What does the law say about video recording police activity? I think that these cops should not only be sued, but suspended. And it would be nice to see it become a big national story, to discourage such behavior in other departments.
Jerry Pournelle
…is interviewed by Instapundit.
A couple points. The SRBs are more than two pieces — they consist of seven segments. And I think that American entrepreneurs/adventurers will be back on the moon before the Chinese are.
[Update early afternoon]
Here’s the Youtube version for those who don’t subscribe to Pajamas TV.
Eighty Percent Of The American People
…know that Barack Obama is a liar.
I’d tweet that, but I don’t want to establish a precedent for actually using my Twitter account.
A Demonstration Of American Democracy
That was apparently the theme of Gilligan’s Island.
Do Guns Cause Crime?
Some thoughts on the ignorance and stupidity of hoplaphobes.
Irritating Little Honor Student
“John Boot” isn’t as impressed with Harry Potter as he’s supposed to be:
Why don’t kids notice that their heroes get everything handed to them on a levitating platter? Because, I guess, they think it’s really cool to imagine themselves riding a dragon as a huge building collapses all around them. A better question is why so many adults seem so intrigued by all things Harry, lining up next to eighth-graders for midnight showings. The answer is: Because as kids have gotten more and more grownup, adults have become children. Tech companies like Pixar and Google fill their offices with game rooms and cereal dispensers. Soon your office will have a 17-year-old guidance counselor on staff to advise you on how not to be so, like, ancient.
I haven’t seen one since (I think) the third one. I haven’t read any of the books. But then, I was just never into magic, except the kind provided by a sufficiently advanced technology.
[Update mid afternoon]
Some commentary on the movie patrons, from Laura Ingraham:
Unless you’ve been contacted by the film’s casting director, there is no reason for you ever to come to a movie in costume. We don’t think you’re cute. We don’t think you’re artistic. We do think you’re a nerd. And the moment you leave the protective company of the other crazy people at the cineplex, you look like a complete idiot. The robe and the wand are not working for you.
For the record, I have never been to a movie in a costume. I actually hate costumes (and Halloween, which seems to have evolved from a childrens’ holiday when I was a kid to an adult one, apparently as a result of many of my age cohorts never growing up). Of course, I have also never seen The Rocky Horror Picture Show. I take no small measure of pride in that, after all these years. I was completely put off it by the rabid fans.
[Saturday update]
I know, I probably shouldn’t give him the traffic, but once again Mark Whittington displays his endless talent for hyperbole (and inability to actually detect people’s emotions or read their minds, despite his continuous attempts), fantasizing that I am “heaping disdain” on Harry Potter. And that I’m doing so to “pretend to be cool.”
The Mainstream Media Can’t Stop Lying
Automatic weapons were not among those being trafficked from American gun shops to Mexican cartels.
Not a single one.
They have been heavily regulated since the National Firearms Act of 1934, and in the 77 years since that became the law of the land, machine guns like those you would find in a a few specialized gun shops have been used in just two illegal homicides.
In yet another unsigned editorial, the New York Times leads with the blatant fabrication that 70 percent of the guns recovered in Mexico come from the United States. This is the most recent talking point created by Democrats, released just before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform heard testimony from ATF whistleblowers about Operation Fast and Furious in June.
The statistical misrepresentation is a variation of the 90 percent lie that the Obama administration has been using since the president was inaugurated. In actuality, 83 percent of guns used by the cartels come from somewhere other than the United States, and of the 17 percent traced to U.S. origins, roughly 8 percent were traced to U.S. gun shops.
Plus, we now know that a substantial portion of the weapons that transited gun shops did so as a direct result of federal law enforcement agencies telling dealers to make questionable sales to suspected cartel gun runners.
A fact the Times conveniently and purposefully ignores.
It’s hard for them to not lie, or be mistaken about guns in general, given how ideologically driven and ignorant they are on the subject.
Government Fat Cats
An interview with Iain Murray (my colleague at the Competitive Enterprise Institute) on his new book
[Update a few minutes later]
An excerpt:
LOPEZ: What do you have against the Consumer Product Safety Commission? Do you like lead in toys?
MURRAY: No, I don’t like lead in toys, but I don’t like people who make toys that have never been anywhere near lead being forced to pay $30,000 to prove that to the CPSC, which gets to almost double its budget to administer these ludicrous requirements. I don’t like the fact that libraries have had to sequester children’s books that were printed before 1985 and may have to burn them. Above all, I don’t like the fact that the people who did put lead in our children’s toys were able to lobby for and win an exemption to the testing requirements. Again, this is an issue where people who like wooden toys — often, in my experience, on the liberal end of the political spectrum — can come together with conservatives to oppose this insanity.
LOPEZ: Is anybody doing this reform right?
MURRAY: People such as Scott Walker in Wisconsin and John Kasich in Ohio have twigged that current conditions are unsustainable and have shown political courage in standing up to the government-sector special interests. It’s been a long fight so far and they may yet lose, but they’re showing the way. At the local level, there are municipalities that have done it right, essentially doing away with their government sector entirely. Sandy Springs in Georgia springs to mind. Some places, such as the Southside Fire Department, also in Georgia, have even worked out how to protect public safety without the bureaucracy.
LOPEZ: Does the Tea Party know this?
MURRAY: The Tea Party understands this can’t go on, but isn’t great when it comes to promoting workable solutions. I’m completely with the Tea Party in terms of motivation, so that’s one of the reasons I wrote the book, to give them some suggestions for workable solutions that can get us from here (Greece) to there (a functioning liberal democracy).
LOPEZ: How much of this is about the New Deal and the Great Society?
MURRAY: The New Deal showed the way, but much of this is more recent. In 1990, we spent $2 trillion in today’s dollars. By 2000 we’d only added $300 billion to that, but in the past decade that’s gone up by a further $1.4 trillion. Moreover, even at the height of the New Deal, FDR recognized that allowing government workers to unionize was asking for trouble.
Read the whole thing.
On Being A Non-Leftist SF Writer
…like all the arts, writing is a liberal’s game. Science fiction, too, I think encourages extreme ideologies, which almost inevitably default left. It’s part of creating a world. You start thinking you could create “logical” rules for “this” world. (I tell you, if Lenin had written SF instead, we’d all be happier.) The climate in the field can best be judged by the fact that I could stand up tomorrow in the middle of a conference room full of my peers and announce I was a communist and they’d all applaud. However, if I announced I’m anti-communist, they would laugh. Some of them might laugh nervously and sympathetically but they would laugh.
Anyone clinging to Marxist theory is immediately believed to be very smart, and someone who goes against it is considered a lightweight.
Do they intentionally discriminate against Libertarians and conservatives? I don’t think so. Not the vast majority of them. The vast majority of my colleagues are decent people. They are also, like the vast majority of the human race, conformists. Most of them attended good schools and grew up in upper middle class neighborhoods (at least most of them who came into the field in the last fifteen years. Yes, there are reasons for that, which I’ll mention rapidly later, if I have time.) Their parents were taught in college about class struggle and that money was evil. They got it at home. They got it from schools. They got it from magazine articles and newspapers. The books they read growing up were infused with unconscious Marxism. OF COURSE they assume anyone who doesn’t agree with them is either stupid or evil. And would you give a leg up to the career of someone who is evil? Would you help them?
The funny thing that always startles me a little is hearing myself addressed as a “conservative.” I’m full of wild-eyed radical ideas not proposed out loud since Thomas Jefferson talked in his sleep, and I’m a “conservative” because I am, ultimately, anti-communist. This is a through-the-looking-glass world, since the establishment is as close to soft — (and sometimes hard) — communism as someone can go without sewing hammers and sickles into all their undies.
And that’s part of the problem there too — I don’t think any of them means to discriminate against me. Some of them even like me, in a slightly bewildered way, but they don’t know what to do with me. I was born in a Latin country, I am female, and yet I don’t consider myself a victim and you truly don’t want to get me going on a-historical theories of great mother goddesses. They don’t know what to make of me, or what to do with me. I make them uncomfortable, and it’s easier to ignore me or not to have me around too much.
It’s always been a little weird, being into both folk music and science fiction, because the prevailing political attitude in both has been leftist, at least for most of my life. One does have to be a little careful of what one says in such groups. And of course, it’s always amusing to see the confoundment on some peoples’ faces in the space activist community, who read my blog and fantasize that I’m a conservative or Republican (or worse, like RAH, a “fascist”), and see me defend Barack Obama’s space policy.
[Update a few minutes later]
For those who haven’t read Darkship Thieves, for which she just won the Prometheus Award, please give me a cut
The President’s Bluff
James Taranto has some thoughts on the fading/faded powers of Barack Obama:
A lot of people have been making fun of the president for supposedly saying, “Don’t call my bluff,” as if he’s admitting he’s bluffing. That seems to us a bit pedantic. Surely what he meant was something like “Don’t think you can call my bluff.”
What got our attention about this exchange as reported by Cantor is the president’s threat to take his case “to the American people.” Would those be the same American people who aren’t paying attention and don’t understand all this complicated stuff?
This seems to us an empty threat not least because since his election, Obama has a poor track record when it comes to taking his case to the American people–who still overwhelmingly oppose ObamaCare, give him poor marks on the economy, and think the debt limit shouldn’t be raised even though it pretty much has to be. He always ends up wishing he’d done a better job “explaining” his position, which at least sounds more humble than saying the American people don’t get it.
Of course, even if that’s what he meant, he’s still implying (in fact clearly stating) that it’s a bluff. And he’s right.
[Update a few minutes later]
Charles K. — “Call Obama’s bluff.”
[Update a couple minutes later]
Eric Cantor — “This is not a game.”
[Update a while later]
“Sounds like Obama won’t even call his own bluff.”