And neither does David Hardy. Who compared the revelations in the Dobyns/ATF case as being a “Watergate or worse.
The ATF and DoJ will bury this, exactly as they tried to get (and unfortunately all-but-succeeded in getting) Fast & Furious buried.
No, I’m not expecting this audience of cynics to be “shocked, simply shocked” at what the fedgov did to agent Jay Dobyns. I even expect that some will say, “Well, he knew the kind of scum he was associating with (and I don’t mean the Hells Angels he infiltrated). He deserved whatever he got.”
So why am I posting this? Maybe I’m doing it just to drive a little traffic David’s way, since examiner.com pays by the pageview and pays so poorly their writers have to hustle views. David deserves the best.
But you know, really I’m posting it because, silly as it is, naive as it sounds, I still want to see wrongs righted. I still want to see these creeps who rule the U.S. brought to justice. I wouldn’t go so far as to say I have hope. But I can’t give up the idea that there’s still at least a hope of a hope. Somewhere. A hope in the mythical power of We the People to tame and hold an “honest government.”
Okay, okay. I just slipped a gear there for a moment. Little fugue state.
Anyhow, we know from F&F that David (and Mike Vanderboegh, too) will grab onto something like this and never let it go. So whether or not real justice is ever administered, those two and others will chip-chip-chip at the crumbling facade of fedgov legitimacy.
The Authoritarians by Bob Altemeyer. Free ebook on conservatives’ (but not just conservatives) attachment to authority. Seems to be well written (by a guy with a sense of humor, too). (H/T Y.B.v.A.)
I agree with Brian Keith’s fine analysis of the “carrots” and the “sticks” in the gun-rights movement. Except, of course, when one of the “carrots” actually goes over to the other side, pretends he can prevent what the enemy really wants, and collaborates by helping write tyrannical legislation.
From Ellendra in comments: have a “go to zero” month. (Kinda what I’ve been doing this month, except this family went much farther than I would. Maybe another month this summer …)
“My Old Dead Drunk Self.” Breaking dependency not only on substances but on the conventions of “recovery.”
Over at TZP, I ponder the mind of Alan Gottlieb as he further strives to divide Washington state gun owners so that that his ally Bloomberg can march on to victory in the next state. (Watch out, Nevada!)
The emergency room: a microcosm for misplaced priorities. We see this in animal rescue/welfare work, too, in the form people who can afford pricey tattoos, cigarettes, and weekly lotto tickets and scratch cards — but “can’t” come up with $25 to keep their pets from producing endless, unhealthy litters year after year.
In legalizing recreational cannabis, Alaska faces some unique hurdles. Well, one unique hurdle, mainly: that hurdle we all know and love so well, the fedgov.
I’ve been watching the Elio with lots of anticipation though I still can’t decide whether it’s all hype or something gonna-be cool. Might be time to start watching the Local Motors Strati, too. 3D printed car.
*The article gets JPFO’s name slightly wrong and says I was an employee when I was always an independent contractor. Minor details, but I couldn’t find a way to contact the author to give him a non-public heads-up. Very good article nevertheless.
Seems that Joel and the rest of the gunblogosphere aren’t the only ones who think Liam Neeson is even worse than the usual Hollywood anti-gun hypocrite. A company that supplied weapons for his films has a thing or three to say about it.
A simple explanation of what Swiss bankers just did. And a slightly more complicated one. I’m sure some of our resident money gurus will have views of their own. If you haven’t been watching, Switzerland threw the entire world into a financial tizzy yesterday. (Though IMHO, their real screwup was when they pegged their franc to the euro, not when they suddenly pulled the peg.)
“That Tree.” To help himself recover after an injury and to meet a friend’s challenge, professional photographer Mark Hirsh found 365 different ways to shoot photos of a single tree — with an iPhone — over the course of a year.
Alan Gottlieb and other mainstreamers sponsored a rally this morning in Olympia, Washington, to plead with legislators to undo the ghastly billionaire-driven I-594.
Although a bill to do that is in the works, WA law doesn’t allow a voter-passed initiative to be easily altered or overturned in its first two years. So that’s interesting in itself. (And never forget: Gottlieb wants background checks; he just wants to be at the table to make the deals.)
What’s more interesting is that today’s Gottliebian beg-your-legislators rally drew only about 1/10th — one tenth — the number that Gavin Seim’s “I Will Not Comply” rally brought to the Capitol last month. That was the rally that Gottlieb tried to undermine.
But here’s the really interesting part. Despite organizers’ requests that everybody leave their guns at home (because, you know, guns are nasty, scary things) … most of the crowd showed up armed. So they weren’t there for Gottliebian purposes.
Yep. In state after state where new anti-freedom outrages have become law, angry, rebellious gun owners are doing the leading while “leaders” stagger along after them, protesting, “Bu-bu-but!”
Via Mike Vanderboegh, who notes that one of the speakers at the rally gave Gottlieb yet one more thing to sweat over.
Santa has been extremely, extremely good to me. Yeah, I know it seems sorta late to mention that, but not really. Apparently Santa hasn’t even finished with me yet.
All the years since 9-11, I’ve scrupulously avoided and condemned the jingoistic notion that all Muslims are fanatics and terrorists. There’s a billion of them and most are pretty much like you and me. But. The strain of barbarism poisoning the Arab/Muslim world is growing more putrid by the moment.
Since the slaughter at the World Trade Center, I’ve been waiting and wondering when the peaceable moderates of Islam would rise up, condemn, shun, defund, and de-legitimize the monsters among them. Well, those moderate voices have been way, way too moderate — when they’ve spoken at all. And they’ve been 100% ineffective. The savages are triumphant.
Now we have these obviously well-planned, expertly (and ruthlessly) executed murders at the French magazine Charlie Hebdo.
Over cartoons. Over satire. Over free speech.
And every sign says that the murders were perpetrated by Islamic terrorists.
Governments have proven utterly incapable of protecting people against these murderous loons. Our own government repeatedly categorizes slaughters by Islamist nutjobs as mere “workplace violence.” Now, believe me, I don’t want governments to go looking for terrorists under every rock — partially because we’re already seeing how ugly that kind of society looks and partly because … well, in the U.S. “the authorities” find it more politically correct to go after militia members and guys in NRA hats than after people who post “Allahu Akbar!” on their Facebook pages before going off to kill their neighbors and co-workers. I assume other countries would also choose convenient non-Islamic targets. And it would be as wrong as ever to consider all Muslims to be potential terrorists.
But these barbarians must be stomped into the mud and muck of history, and I think the primary people responsible for doing it are … other Muslims. Yes, yes, I’m aware that Islam is a distributed religion. It has no pope. It’s as fragmented as U.S. Protestantism. It has no mechanism for acting from one central source, or even to act reliably in concert. Nevertheless, we’ve got a world full of well-trained Islamist thugs who increasingly believe they can simply cut down (sometimes literally) anybody who disagrees with them. And IF most of those tens of millions of other, innocent Muslims — and their imams and their ayatollahs and their cultural, intellectual, and military leaders — really, truly are against this savagery, if they really, truly believe in the rights of their fellow human beings, then it’s time for the whole Muslim world to bring all its philosophical, economic, social, and moral might down — hard! — upon the putrid savages within their midst.
Individual Muslims aren’t to blame. But their religion is. It fosters savagery. They need to address that.
Meantime, a world of innocent people — not to mention those who were already as much at risk as the Charlie Hebdo editors, cartoonists, and writers — ought to be getting better armed — even if nobody gives them permission.
