Sometimes, you hold a secret that’s so inflammatory, so divisive, so certain to lead to sturm und drang, that you just hang onto it. You keep it bottled up inside, and let it fester, for months, years, even decades.
Sometimes you take those secrets to the grave.
But sometimes – rarely, but it blessedly happens – something allows you to break the silence, and let the secret out, and let the truth be known.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
When did protesting become an all-purpose Get Out Of Jail Free card?
Black Lives Matter want to protest police brutality, so they walk down the middle of the freeway. That costs the taxpayers money paying cops overtime to guard the protestors and paying highway crews overtime to clean up after them, money which is NOT going to repairing our failing infrastructure of roads and bridges. The cost per protester might easily be thousands of dollars.
If I wanted to film the chase scene for a movie set on that same stretch of freeway, I’d have to get a permit, film at non-rush hour, pay the cops and pay for clean-up. Why should those services be free for protesters?
Add in the societal cost of blocking I-35 during rush hour last year, or blocking I-94 on 4th of July Weekend, the thousands of hours lost by people who couldn’t get home, the tons of additional pollutants discharged by idling engines, the emotional damage to families caused by “Are we there yet” and “Stop crying or I’ll give you something to cry about” making this the Worst Vacation Ever . . . the protesters have much to answer for.
Arrest them, charge them with a crime, sentence them to time served and a one-dollar fine PLUS restitution. Let’s see how serious they are when the real cost of their anti-social activities are laid at their feet.
Joe Doakes
The whole point of “civil disobedience” is accepting the consequences of doing something illegal and confrontational, to highlight the injustice – especially if it’s really, really unjust.
Water cannon blasting black school children? Highlighted injustice pretty starkly.
People blocking interstates, keeping other people from getting to/from work with no consequence to themselves? Not so much.
As this is written, as many as sixty dead in Nice, France. The weapon? A truck.
Berg’s 17th Law is in full effect; the mainstream media will get every single fact of this story wrong for the next 24-48 hours.
So I won’t speculate yet.
CNN – which is part of the mass media we should not trust for the next day or two – says the occupants (pl) of the truck started shooting at the crowd after they rammed into the throng.
We’ll see.
UPDATE: We don’t know if this is linked with Nice, but it sure doesn’t look good:
ALERTE : incendie au pied de la #TourEiffel !! Video : pic.twitter.com/aUkmzlpyV2
— Alexis THIEBAUT (@alexisthiebaut) July 14, 2016
UPDATE 2: Le Monde says sixty dead: the Daily Mail and Le Figaro say 73. Frankfurter Allgemeine is saying 73 dead, 120 injured.
UPDATE 3: Some French media reports on Twitter say the fire at the Eiffel Tower was just a truck full of fireworks burning.
If true, that’d be a pretty amazing coincidence…
UPDATE 4: Sky News quotes French authorities saying it’s a terrorist attack, saying 75 dead, in critical condition. They are also quoting a witness who said they saw one of the occupants of the truck coming out shooting
Here’s the live Sky News feed:
As this is written – 7:30PM Central US time – they’re vamping. Berg’s 17th Law is in effect.
One of the aphorisms that I’ve always used to guide my life is an old Hungarian saying; “the best way to become wealthy is to appear as if you already are”. It’s not just about money; Dennis Prager notes a similar principle when it comes to happiness. Prager and others note that when all else fails, the best way to bring love back to a loveless relationship is to act as if you are still very much in love. More mundane? Innumerable business books advise young would-be up-and-comers to dress for the position they want, not the one they’re in.
Ameircan slang also renders the saying as “fake it ’til you make it”.
And it’s not bad advice; the best way out of poverty is to stop acting poor.
Unfortunately, government is spending a lot of (your) money to promote the idea that acting poor is good for you.
Along these lines, a friend of the blog writes:
Last week, before Philando Castile was shot, a friend of mine, who is black, and I were discussing racism in Minnesota. He was shaking his head, wondering why black people are told to act, dress, and talk a certain way when he sees Somalis “getting a pass.” “And they’re the ones trying to blow us up!” he says.
What would he change? Well, when he was born, his parents lived in Cabrini Green. So, he has a good perspective. He would stop building subsidized housing for black people. He would stop forcing everyone to take the bus. “I’d never let my kids on those things.” He’s told me before that he’d told his family to do whatever they need to in order to afford a car- even if it means giving up a lot of other things.
I have a feeling that many other black people feel the same way. And I think it is great that the protests are happening at the Governor’s mansion, because obviously Dayton is part of the problem in terms of what my friend would fix. But, it’s too bad that Black Lives Matter is just another activist group with no more intention of helping people than any other activist group- my friend’s message will never get heard over the special interests.
It’s both symbolic and eminently practical; our government is trying to jam us into “high density” lifestyles, which is code (!) for “how poor people live”; to live, work and travel crammed together like passive-aggressive sardines.
We could have literally bought 140,000 late-model used cars for $10,000 a pop for the money we spent on the Green Death Machine. That’s more than enough to equip every impoverished family in Saint Paul with a reliable vehicle – a portal to better jobs, to school choice, to opportunity.
But no. We spent $1.4 billion so they, and a lot of middle-class people, could be poor…on tracks.
We sent the poor people to failing schools so they can be poor…with administrators with really great pensions.
What’s wrong here?
Lately, the left has been making the following fairly fantastic claim:
I’ve heard this a few times – and it gave me one of my customarily-brilliant ideas.
I challenge the Reverend Nancy Nord Bence, Joan Peterson, and any other leaders of “Everytown”, “Moms Want Action” and “Protect” MN to meet me in North Minneapolis or Dayton’s Bluff…
(you may have to Google them, since you don’t seem to have any of your gun violence protests in either place)
…and play what I call “The Meme Scavenger Hunt”.
The goal is this: They’ll drop us in the neighborhood. My mission: find a book. Your mission: find a gun. First one to find the book or gun wins; loser buys dinner for the winner.
Any action on that challenge?
There are two types of people in the world:
Type 1: People who don’t sort people into elaborate taxonomies.
Type 2: People who DO sort people into elaborate taxonomies.
That is all.
The etymology of “Pompatus”. As in “Pompatus of Love”, of Steve Miller fame.
Yes, there is an etymology.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
There are 10,000 sworn officers employed in Minnesota. They shoot an average of 10 people per year for the past 15 years No police officer was charged in any of those deaths. There are 200,000 Minnesotans with valid permits to carry a firearm. The Violence Policy Center (a gun-control advocacy group) tracks their offenses going back to 2008. Permit holders shoot an average of 2 people per year. Four permit holders have been charged with crimes (two are pending).
Police shoot 1 person per 1,000 cops. Permit holders shoot 1 person per 100,000 permit holders. Permit holders shoot fewer people in total, and fewer people per capita, than police. Minnesota police are 100 times more likely to shoot somebody than Minnesota pistol permit holders.
Minnesota police shooters are never charged, just like FBI shooters are never charged. That could be because no Minnesota law enforcement officer has ever made a mistake; it could be because of institutional bias shielding members of the law enforcement community from the consequences of their mistakes; or it could be because the law gives police officers special privileges that are denied to permit holders.
What is the correct procedure when an officer is approaching a vehicle during a traffic stop? Hand on pistol, just in case the driver is a threat to the officer.
What is the correct procedure when the driver identities himself as a cop? Most likely, the officer can take his hand off his pistol because even though the driver has a gun, that particular driver is not a threat to the officer. If the officer wants the driver out of the car, what’s the procedure to secure a fellow officer’s gun — take it away or let him keep it?
What is the correct procedure when the driver identifies himself as a permit holder? Statistically, that driver is even less likely to be a threat to the officer than when the driver is a cop. Shouldn’t the “not-a-threat-to-the-officer” procedure be similar – hand off the pistol? If the officer wants the driver out of the car, what’s the procedure to secure a permitted carrier’s gun – take it away or let him keep it?
If the procedures are not identical, why not? If the statistics show permitted carriers are less likely to shoot than fellow cops, why is the procedure different? Tribalism, loyalty to the Blue Line Clan? Stereotyping? That’s not a rational basis for treating safer people worse.
If there were a rational basis for a difference in procedures, how should they differ?
And most importantly of all, how do we inform officers and permitted carriers of the procedure, to make sure that nobody dies from mis-communication?
Joe Doakes
It’s the second-scariest thing about carrying.
“The tree of liberty must be watered from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants”.
— Often attributed to Thomas Jefferson, possibly apocryphally.
Deterrence: America is the result of a revolution – not an ideological or market revolution, but a military revolt against what the colonists (or at least the ones who ended up winning) considered a hostile occupying power.
Whether or not the Second Amendment was specifically intended to allow Americans to rebel against a future tyranny is the subject of any number of debates by both the informed and the less-so; in the seminal Yale Law Review article “The Embarassing Second Amendment”, Sanford Levinson notes that in Professor T. Cooley’s ” T. Cooley, The General Principles of Constitutional Law in The United States of America 298 (3d ed. 1898), that the thinking among scholars in the nineteenth century was “Should the contingency ever arise when it would be necessary for the people to make use of the arms in their hands for the protection of constitutional liberty, the proceeding, so far from being revolutionary, would be in strict accord with popular right and duty.”
The notion that The People have a right to rebel against a government that becomes unjust and tyrannical is instituted in a number of state constitutions: New Hampshire, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, Tennessee, North Carolina and most notably Texas all consider the right to rebel important enough to bake into the foundation of their state government.
Beyond that? The constitutions of Germany, Greece, and the Czech and Slovak Republics – all of whom have experience with real live tyranny within living memory – all recognize a human right to fight against tyranny.
And if that’s not enough for you? That noted favorite of conservatives, the United Nations Universal Declaration of Human Rights declares:
Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by rule of law.
Which is an oblique way of recognizing the justice of armed uprising against tyrants.
So it’s not like the idea that free people have the right to remain free, even if they have to convince their idiot government to stay that way, is a product of the American lunatic fringe.
Of course, rebellion against a civil government is a daunting task, not for the faint of heart. And it’s certainly not to be undertaken trivially. To paraphrase the computer in War Games, the only way to “win” a rebellion is to never really have to fight it with force of arms.
Fortunately, our founding fathers were smart enough to enact a little poison pill to deter tyranny.
The Second Amendment.
The idea, and ideal, being that a government that knew a lapse into tyranny could be answered by an armed, motivated people, was built into the Constitution, not a battle plan for future citizens, but as a deterrent to anyone with bright ideas of squashing the rest of the freedoms granted us all by our creator.
And so far it – the deterrent – has worked.
Useless Idiots: The National Rifle Association, since its rise as a political organization forty years ago, has embraced the idea that the Second Amendment deters tyranny.
And key to any deterrent is the certain knowledge among those to be deterred that the threat is not idle. If you buy a pit bull to guard your house, but advertise that he’s always muzzled, meaning his bark will be all the dog has going for him? His value as a deterrent is limited.
So the NRA – like most gun-owning, politically-active Americans – is not slavering away for an armed revolt. War is, as Sherman said, hell. It hurts people and breaks things.
Long story short: deterrence. Not war.
Someone needs to tell it to the precious snowflake who wrote this excrescent bit of bile for the HuffPo:
The gun lobby has long preached armed insurrectionism as a panacea for those facing oppression.
The “writer” – one Ladd Everett, director of some fragrant non-profit -states this repeatedly as settled fact. The conflates “deterrence” with “wishing for violence”. It’s dishonest…
…but it’s the gun control movement we’re talking about here; “dishonesty” is “dog licks dog”.
When Micah Xavier Johnson opened fire on Dallas law enforcement officers during a Black Lives Matter protest on Thursday night, killing five and injuring seven others, he was fighting what he perceived as government oppression with a method that has long been advocated by the National Rifle Association and gun lobby: force of arms.
Let me see if I can get this straight:
It doesn’t really add up.
The NRA has long disseminated propaganda telling African-Americans that gun control is “racist” and that they must prepare for war with their own government in order to truly be free. For example, current NRA board member (and past president) David Keene has claimed that “the initial wave of [gun control] was instituted after the Civil War to deny blacks the ability to defend themselves.”
Keene claimed it – because it’s true. After the Civil War, Klan-dominated southern governments tried to bar black freedmen from having guns; they were shooting up too many Klan attacks. It helped lead to the “Equal Protection” clause of the 14th Amendment.
In 2013, NRA favorite Glenn Beck was the featured speaker at their annual meeting, where he told those in attendance that “universal access to firearms is indistinguishable from Emancipation.”
And while I’m not a huge Beck fan, he was right. The ability to protect one’s self, property, family, community and democracy is one of the things that distinguishes a citizen – one who actively participates in governing himself and his society – from a subject, a serf, a fyrd, a slave.
If one is not armed, one’s freedom exists only through the beneficence of those who are.
In Dallas, the NRA’s prescription for oppressed minorities was fully realized. According to Dallas Mayor Mike Rawlings, at least 20 people showed up to the rally on July 7 openly carrying rifles and wearing “protective gear,” making a not so-subtle threat of violence against a government which they believe has overstepped its bounds in terms of policing.
So let’s get this straight; when a group of protesters chants “Pigs are like bacon; fry ’em in a pan!” to indicate to the police that they’re angry enough with police abuse to threaten death, it’s the apogee of free speech. When one of those same (?) people shows up showing that he has the means, as a free citizen, to make it stick, suddenly it’s wrong?
So “freedom” only matters when it has no consequences?
Micah Xavier Johnson then made good on that threat, destroying at least six families in the process.
Well, no. The open-carriers threatened nobody. They exercised their constitutional and legal rights. Micah Jackson violated the rights of others – of a whole city – in the most profound way possible, by doing something none of the other shooters did.
Of course, getting the distintion would imply that Ladd Everett “gets” civil rights.
He doesn’t. He is a propaganda mouthpiece.
How do I know? This next bit is the tell:
Let’s keep in mind that there is nothing principled about the NRA’s call for black Americans to arm themselves. For them, it is entirely about profit motive. They understand that fear sells guns, and they have intimate financial ties to the gun industry. Their priority is to push product.
The whole “NRA is about profit” line showcases the gun controllers’ logical vacuity. Americans have been armed well enough to deter tyranny since our founding. Americans have had a (legtimate) disdain for tyranny since before even that. That is the status quo, among Americans who actually think about the nature of government and man (who are fairly common between the Hudson and the Sierra Madre, though vanishingly rare outside those borders).
The “fear” – that the status quo will be changed – which drives the current astronomical gun sales and three-shift gun production is entirely a product of the left’s eliminationist hysteria about guns.
So you will likely continue to see insurrectionist appeals and transparent efforts to market firearms to urban youth like the NRA’s “Noir” show.
Aaaaand the racism.
The NRA makes no more “insurrectionist appeal” than do six state and four national Constitutions, and the United Nations.
It’s the people for whom Ladd Everett is a useful idiot that are prone to the violence.
While I don’t support Black Lives’ Matter Twin Cities’ strategy or leadership, I don’t doubt for a moment that black people have every legitimate reason to protest against perceptions of excessive police violence…
…while noting that the loudest calls for more police in neighborhoods like the North Side of Minneapolis, the lower East Side of Saint Paul, and the North End come from…
…black and other minority residents, who are the main victims of crime in those neighborhoods.
I also will not pretend to be qualified to judge the violent demonstration that broke out Saturday night in Saint Paul – although Governor Flint Smith Dayton’s statements on the Castile shooting were deeply stupid. I do think that the subtext of these protests is to try to drive everyone to one extreme or the other – to “Frame” them, in Alinskyite terms.
WIth all that out of the way? Here’s the mug shot gallery of those arrested at the Black Lives Matter protest on Saturday:
I’m shocked – shocked, I tell you – to see that all but five of the 46 arrested were visibly annoying, Whole Foods shopping, oil-belching-Subaru driving and/or cargo-bike-up-Snelling-At-Universty-at-11PM riding, non-profit-“working”, amateur-“Professional-Protester”, Sanders-voting lilywhite hipsters.
They say you can’t judge a book by its cover, of course – but then, I won’t beg forgiveness, since what are these protests but judging all humans by skin color – for and against?
Feel the Hill!
No, you WILL feel it! NOW!
To: Bernie Sanders supporters
From: Mitch Berg – Uppity Peasant
Re: Feeling Stupid?
All
Bernie Sanders endorsing Hillary?
Why, isn’t that exactly like endorsing the Wall Street and military-industrial complex he railed against?
Yeah. It totally is.
Every last one of you has been had. Played for fools. Suckers.
That is all.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails
Democrats want to use the No Fly list to deny suspected terrorists the right to buy guns. If Hillary wins, considering the Clinton’s history of renting out the Lincoln bedroom in exchange for campaign contributions, I would anticipate them expanding the program and operating it like a Public Television fundraiser.
If you make no donation, your name stays on the list and you cannot exercise Constitutionally protected rights.
For $25, you will not be subject to a “random” tax audit. This doesn’t protect you from a justified audit based on red flags on your return, but it will avoid the “random” audit of political enemies that President Obama pioneered in his first term.
For $50, you can take one round-trip flight. Go ahead and book that vacation, you’ve got flight insurance.
For $100, you can vote in this year’s election. Special discounts are available for groups likely to vote Democrat: Blacks, welfare recipients, illegal immigrants. And by “discount” of course, I mean a program like the Earned Income Credit where the government pays you. But it’s per vote so in some cities, it could be a huge economic stimulus.
For $500, you can apply for a permit to be considered to purchase a single round of ammunition. Not guaranteed, it’s dependent on a background check and is discretionary with the local Democrat party chairman who will consider whether you are a person of “Good Moral Character” meaning “not a Republican.” But you can apply.
For a cool million, you can buy any firearm you want, even fully automatic, no background check, no waiting, conveniently delivered to your door by agents of the ATF themselves. Because if you can afford to make that large a donation, by definition you are one of the Good People and not one of the Little People, so ordinary laws don’t apply to you.
The sad part is Republicans are poised to give it to them.
Joe Doakes
Sad, but true.
Do you remember when the left and mainstream media tried to tie Sarah Palin to Jared Loughner’s spree killing in Tuscon, which wounded Gabby Gifford (and killed a bunch of people the media don’t care about) because she’d completely innocently used “crosshairs” on a map?
Of course you do.
Do you remember when Al Sharpton told people to kill cops in as many words?
Speaking of memory holes: it’s been five days since the slaughter in Dallas. By this point in most recent mass-killings, we has a lot of detail about the killers; Holmes, Mateen, Loughner, Lanza, Harris and Klebold, Cho, even Hassan. And we’d had detailed dissections of the firearms they’d used – because those were the real enemies, natch.
And yet a cursory examination shows very little interest, it seems, in Micah Jackson’s past, and very little scrutiny about his SKS rifle.
We don’t know the details, and that means you or me. But if someone wanted to bet me $100 that the silence was because Jackson was a known “progressive” activist, and the SKS was an utterly unmodified, thoroughly plain-jane rifle, I wouldn’t take the bet.
The House candidate in my district (65A), Monique Giordana, is running against Rena Moran, about whom the best that can be said is that she’s what you get when machines control cities.
Monique is a very sharp woman. She gets healthcare – she’s a pharmacist at a cancer center, and sees the results of MNSure and Obamacare first-hand, every day. She lives in the neighborhood (obviously).
And she got into the race late, but is running a good campaign so far. She also needs to get to a $1,500 threshold, in increments of $50 or less, by Monday to get a subsidy from the state (I know, I know – but that’s how the game is played in this state.
So if you’ve got a buck or two, and could spare a few to help out an underdog in a race where it’d be fantastic to have a real impact, please go here and learn more about Monique, and if you can, peel off a buck or two for her over here.
She’s gonna be on the NARN this weekend, by the way, along with 65B candidate Margaret Stokely.
Police overreach; it’s not just for black people anymore:
In 2014, for the first time ever, law enforcement officers took more property from American citizens than burglars did. Martin Armstrong pointed this out at his blog, Armstrong Economics, last week.
Officers can take cash and property from people without convicting or even charging them with a crime — yes, really! — through the highly controversial practice known as civil asset forfeiture. Last year, according to the Institute for Justice, the Treasury and Justice departments deposited more than $5 billion into their respective asset forfeiture funds. That same year, the FBI reports that burglary losses topped out at $3.5 billion.
The WaPo’s Christopher Ingraham notes that on the one hand, the figure is a little misleading for two reasons: the “burglary” figure counts only rigidly-defined burglaries, and ignores a variety of other larcenies and thefts (which, together, add up to double what the cops take), and the cops don’t keep it all.
But even counting only what they keep from burglaries, they still siphoned 50% more out of the economy than burglars did.
And that includes an awful lot of people never convicted of any crime.
Taking property without a conviction is something that needs to stop.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
I’m old enough that having amateur debaters attempt to play their tricks on me has become tiresome. In a recent on-line exchange, my opponent said “I can see you have a lot of anger on this issue. You need help.” Nice try, but no cigar. I know that trick and it no longer works on me.
Accusing me of being angry is a rhetorical device intended to disqualify my opinion by implying that I’m not rational, I’m hysterical. It’s also intended to thereby divert attention from the hollowness of my opponent’s intellectual position and therefore acts as an admission that her position IS hollow since, if my opponent had a worthwhile argument to make, she’d have made it; the fact she didn’t make one is compelling evidence she had none to make.
My response was along the lines of: “Don’t snivel. It’s not seemly to sit there bawling when you’ve been bested. Stiff upper lip! Oh, you weren’t crying? Of course not, no more than I was angry, so let’s both can drop the posturing. Talk sense if you have it; if not, shut up.”
Didn’t want that person as a “friend” anyway.
Joe Doakes
“People who believe as you do are often compensating for something, ifyaknowhatImean.”
“Yes, We’re compensating for the fact that there are a lot of stupid, evil people in the world. Oh, as to the blue reference, you “know what I mean” in only the most abstract possible sense, ifyaknowwhatImean.
I’m going to share a little secret, just between the two of us; I always get nervous, during gun control debates, when the topic turns to the technicalities of different types of guns.
Don’t get me wrong; illiteracy about guns is one of the things that gun controllers exploit to ram down their factually-vacant, emotion-laden “points”. When the vast majority of people, and even some shooters, don’t know the difference between an “assault rifle” (an intermediate-caliber (less powerful cartridge than a rifle!) selective-fire long arm) and an “assault weapon” (a set of fluid cosmetic characteristics that have nothing to do with lethality), it’s impossible to have a literate debate.
Which, to gun controllers, is a feature, not a bug.
But this reared its head in an illuminating way in the Dallas shooting.
Exactly as predicted by Berg’s Eighteenth Law of Media Latency, the media got everything wrong about the Dallas shootings for the first 24-48 hours. It was not a group of men “triangulating” their prey – it was one guy, Micah Jackson.
And he was not shooting the official boogeyman (also: only gun most media people can name, other than “Glock”), the AR15.
There are many configurations of AR15.
He was in fact shooting an “SKS” – a World War II-vintage Russian design.
It’s as rugged as any other Russian design; it’s bone simple to maintain; it’s just about the least-expensive military-grade rifle available on the legal market in America (still widely available for under $350; a few years ago, they were around $100 apiece). It’s become an incredibly popular hunting firearm.
And, since “big magazines” are the boogeyman-du-jour, it holds ten rounds, in a non-detachable magazine, in its unmodified form.
Some gun-rights supporters jumped on this, to note that this, in and of itself, invalidates the “assault weapons” debate entirely.
It does – but not in the way the pro-gunners think it does.
Because while the SKS isn’t a modern, utterly modular design that can be rebuilt in a nearly infinite variety of permutations like the AR, it is the basis for some ingenuity. There are parts on the aftermarket to turn an SKS into a poor man’s AK47:
This, too, is an SKS – with aftermarket adjustable stock, replacement magazine well that uses AK47 magazines, and an aftermarket forearm with an accessory rail holding the foregrip and bipod, this “tacti-cool” SKS is not one degree behind the fashion curve.
Now, while parts of the media are announcing that Jackson used an SKS (after frantically learning how to spell it), not a single outlet (as this is written) has shown a picture of the murder weapon.
Maybe they don’t have it.
And maybe they do, but it resembles the first SKS – a humble, unadorned, vaguely antique-looking rifle that looks like an awkwardly-designed hunting rifle.
My point: like the AR, almost any rifle can be modified into an almost-unrecognizable form.
There are, as we’ve seen above, SKSes that metamorphose from awkward, boxy antiques to menacing-looking Hollywood specials.
And there are AR15s that are modified to look and function little differently than Grandpa’s hunting rifle:
Wood furniture, ten round magazine. That’s not threatening, is it?
Even better example: the Lee Enfield Mark1 “SMLE” was the standard rifle of the British army from the early 1900s to the late 1950s.
An “SMLE” Enfield that served in both World Wars, and quite possibly well beyond. It looks like a hunting rifle, because these days it is.
It looks like a hunting rifle – and indeed it was, and is, used as one in vast numbers in the US (although the ammunition is hideously expensive; $2 a around. Ask me how I know).
Early in World War 2, when the British Army had left most of its equipment in France, there wasn’t enough production capacity to build enough machine guns to equip the Australian and New Zealand armies. An Australian officer invented a Rube Goldberg-esque contraption based on an Enfield that turned it into a light machine gun:
Yep – it’s a Lee Enfield rifle, with a bunch of home-made parts bolted on, turning it into a machine gun.
The real point being, cosmetic and even technical definitions of firearms are virtually meaningless in the long run; even under Nazi occupation, machinists built fully-automatic submachine guns in machine shops for the various resistance movements (the “NRA” of their day, in the various Nazi-occupied countries).
One of these two was built in Enfield, England. One was built in a machine shop somewhere in occupied Poland. Take a moment and guess which is which.
No, cosmetics, and even abstruse technical terminology, has absolutely nothing on the motivation and, sometimes, ingenuity, of the person doing the shooting. Some, like the Polish guerrillas and the Australian Army, use those motivations and ingenuity for good (or “as good as we can get”, anyway).
Micah Jackson’s technology was more or less irrelevant; he could have committed precisely the same mayhem with any number of common hunting rifles. Maybe more.
Remember all the wondrous things Obama wrought by nationalizing the healthcare system?
Remember? Heck, you’ve barely started feeling the pain!
But wait. It gets worse. Now, he wants to nationalize the police:
The report urges the federal government to federalize police training and practices, via the use of federal lawsuits, grants and threats to cut federal aid. So far, Obama’s deputies have cajoled and sued more than 30 police jurisdictions to adopt federal rules in a slow-motion creation of a national police system, similar to the slow-motion creation of a federal-run health-sector via Obamacare.
Obama also used the press conference to insulate his federalized police program — and his allies in the Black Live Matter movement — from popular rejection after the five police were murdered by the anti-cop African-American in Dallas.
“The danger is that we somehow think the act of a troubled person speaks to some larger political statement across the country — it doesn’t,” Obama insisted.
This has the potential to be the most corrosive domestic part of an already toxic legacy.
Joe Doakes from Como Park emails:
President Obama promised to transform America.
A college degree is no longer a sure investment.
Real estate is no longer an escalator to wealth.
Government bonds pay the lowest rates ever.
Race relations have never been worse.
Bathrooms are confusing.
Once, at least we had . . .
The Rule of Law, but
So . . .
What’s the survival strategy for the Second Clinton Presidency?
Joe Doakes
You did see “Red Dawn”, right?
Info on the Veterans Job Fair, coming up July 13.
Victor Lake is running for MN Senate in SD51 – Eagan and Burnsville. Here’s his website.
And finally,♫ today’s music playlist.
Today, the Northern Alliance Radio Network – America’s first grass-roots talk radio show – is on the air! I will be on live from 1-3PM today!
Don’t forget – King Banaian is on from 9-11AM on AM1440, and Brad Carlson has “The Closer” edition of the NARN Sundays from 2-3PM.
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I’m going to take a moment to cite Berg’s Eighteenth Law of Media Latency: “Nothing the media writes/says about any emotionally charged event – a mass shooting, a police shooting, anything – should be taken seriously for 48 hours after the original incident. It will largely be rubbish, as media outlets vie to “scoop” each other even on incorrect facts.”
Yesterday was a pretty crappy day for everyone – except the “let’s force everyone to one extreme or the other, for easier framing” community.
We’ll come back to that.
First, let’s talk about Falcon Heights.
On Edge: Watch this video:
Kinda scary, huh?
Kinda makes you want to curl up in an armored coccoon, doesn’t it?
Sources in law enforcement tell me that this video is shown to most new police recruits on or about their first day of training, these days.
Not a video of a cop settling a dispute between errant neigbhors.
Not a video of a cop catching a sex trafficker (let’s assume they’re real, while we’re up).
Not one of a cop setting a young stalker straight before he seriously screws up his life.
No – the impression that police departments start their rookies off with is that “any situation you’re in, any contact you make, anything you do and anything you don’t do, can end up with you being gunned down like Old Yeller by the side of the road. Be careful out there.
What message does this send to new cops? “There are two kinds of people out there; people in badges, and people who might kill people in badges. Be careful out there”. It’s a sort of siege mentality.
We’ll come back to that.
Take a little siege mentality. Add in what may have been really poor training; the Saint Anthony Police Department has come in for some criticism even before Wednesday’s events.
Part of that poor training, perhaps? In carry permit training, students (of all races) are warned; handling cops if you get pulled over is one of the most dangerous parts of having a carry permit. All cops get cautious when the “g” word comes up; some of them go way beyond (notwithstanding the fact that carry permittees are a couple orders of magnitude less likely to shoot anyone, much less a cop, than the general public). If it turns out Castile was a carry permit holder, and he was (as his girlfriend pointed out in the video she shot from the scene) reaching for his permit as most people are taught in their carry permit training, then at least one cop needed some better training on that subject.
Was Castile the victim of racism? Perhaps. Although the herd consensus that there’s an epidemic of racist cops killing black people is not exactly statistically clear-cut, much less unanimous. All shootings, including those involving the police, are complicated.
So on the one hand, you have a police force that operates from a basis of “force protection”, rather than “protecting and serving the community” – more of a military than civil concept – and a community with some serious beefs over how that works in the community, at a time when racial tensions are the highest they’ve been in fifty years (thanks, President Obama, for all that racial healing), in a state where the dominant political establishment is politically tied to both the police unions and the non-profit “social justice” sector”.
Sound like it’ll be hard to unravel? You’re probably right.
Dallas: And any chance of unraveling that first Gordian Knot got blown away in a fusillade of sniper fire last night in Dallas.
I can’t begin to comment; Berg’s Eighteenth Law applies to me, too.
More on the show tomorrow.
I’ve been a Comcast Internet customer for the better part of 16 years, now.
And are very, very rarely have problems with my service.
But when I do, it’s a humdinger.
I’m going to hope to be back online on Monday.
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