He has a PPSh-41 submachine gun, not one, but 2, Nagant Model 1895 revolvers, three fragmentation grenades and three concussion grenades, plus a belt of 7.62×54mmR cartridges for a not-in-evidence Moison Nagant rifle.

Hat tip to Ratak Mondosico.

Just faster than one other photographer.

From grand.

David Frum (the poor man’s Andrew Sullivan), got a good deal of attention for his tweet last weekend: “Hypothesis: the people who most want to carry are the very last people on earth who should be allowed to carry.”

One of the best rejoinders came from David French.

In my experience, those individuals who carry do so because they very consciously do not want to belong to the class of citizens that is inherently helpless — totally reliant upon the state to protect not just themselves but their family, friends, and neighbors. If the choice is between protectors and protected, they choose to be protectors.

This identity is often inseparable from the notion that there is no set of government policies — no utopia — that can eliminate from human society the need for immediate protection. People can and will try to hurt others — using whatever means immediately available — and it strikes us as utterly reckless to be unprepared for this reality.

The protected class has a different view. The protected class is a dependent class — not economically dependent of course, but dependent on the state in perhaps a more fundamental way (for their very lives) – and like members of other dependent classes, they are terrified of flaws in the state’s protective apparatus. Walled off from gun culture, they read the occasional, aberrant story of (legal) gun-owner stupidity or recklessness and cower in fear of a nonexistent threat. (While of course blithely sending their kids off to far more dangerous activities, like swimming in neighbors’ pools or riding in neighbors’ cars).

To the protected class, private ownership of firearms is the flaw in the system that makes them feel vulnerable. It’s the barrier to the safety they crave but can’t provide.

Thus the irreconcilable cultural divide: The very thing that provides security and safety for the gun-owner and his or her family frightens their non-gun-owning friends and neighbors, but the root of the problem is not the gun but the protected person’s very sense of themselves.

Read the whole thing.

Dan Greenfield explains that our modern militarized police did not come from nowhere. He argues that machine-gun-carrying cops, riding around in armored personnel carriers, constitutes just one more untoward after-effect of liberal policies.

The police escalation that shows up on countless videos exists because the people demanded it. And the people demanded it because liberal social policies made entire cities unlivable. The militarized police forces out of cities like Los Angeles filtered down to the suburbs and the rural areas as the same policies and populations that made cities unlivable began spreading outward.

The police state, associated with the right, worked in tandem with the social policies of the left, to dull the pain of those policies. That “dulling” has become the new role of conservative politicians in America who manage the disaster instead of rolling it back. The left realized that without the police state, its policies faced a much broader level of rejection so it learned to tolerate the pigs and the man.

Urban areas were still a disaster, but relentless computerized policing reduced crime enough to make it appear that things had improved. The visible crime statistics however were only the symptoms of the problem. The left had been right about that. It was just wrong about the cause. It was the cause all along. Its social policies had created social problems that the police state managed.

Having armed goons patrol the streets made cities viable again. And that brought in the tax base which allowed the left to experiment with more of the same social policies. The Giulianis made it safe for the Bloombergs and then the De Blasios to come back. In the same way Bush’s war policies paved the way for the Obama years by dulling the pain of international terrorism.

Read the whole thing.

DougRoss has the data.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

Dorothy Thompson, back in August of 1941, published an article in Harper’s discussing the susceptibility of various types of person to succumbing to the influence of fashion, of conformity, of opportunism, and to the appeal of the mass movement.

It is an interesting and somewhat macabre parlor game to play at a large gathering of one’s acquaintances: to speculate who in a showdown would go Nazi. By now, I think I know. I have gone through the experience many times—in Germany, in Austria, and in France. I have come to know the types: the born Nazis, the Nazis whom democracy itself has created, the certain-to-be fellow-travelers. And I also know those who never, under any conceivable circumstances, would become Nazis.

Wikipedia article on Dorothy Thompson.

Those of us in the Baby Boom generation who lived through the time of the Anti-Vietnam War Movement saw plenty of the kinds of joiners Dorothy Thompson describes.

Hat tip to Karen L. Myers.

The worst thing about living under liberals isn’t the deliberate erosion of the Constitution, the disastrous nationalization of medical insurance, the ever-shrinking percentage of Americans in the workforce, the monstrous debt, the looming hyperinflation, America’s diminished status in the world, the degradation of military preparedness and morale, the disintegration of education, or the horror of realizing that the insolent, self-satisfied punk who pokes a finger in your eye every time you turn on the TV is the President of the USA.

The worst thing is what they are making us into as a people.

From Happy Acres via Vanderleun.

Hieronymus Bosch, detail from The Garden of Earthly Delights tryptich , circa 1503-1504, Museo del Prado, Madrid

Amelia, an undergraduate studying music and informations systems at Oklahoma Christian U., a few days back, served up an interesting little bit piece of musicology.

Luke and I were looking at Hieronymus Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights and discovered, much to our amusement, music written upon the posterior of one of the many tortured denizens of the rightmost panel of the painting which is intended to represent Hell. I decided to transcribe it into modern notation, assuming the second line of the staff is C, as is common for chants of this era.

so yes this is LITERALLY the 600-years-old butt song from hell

EDIT: I still can’t believe this took off like it did this is crazy??? Just wanted to let people know that there are indeed errors in the transcription and this is indeed not a very good recording (I threw this together in like 30 minutes at 1 in the morning,) but I’m working with the music department at my college to get the transcription more accurate!

(If Soundcloud embed does not appear, use link)

Hat tips to io9 and Ratak Monodosico.

Played by James Ehnes.

From MEP Daniel Hannan via Troy Senik.