The Gingrich campaign apparently self-destructed this week.
Sarah Palin is wandering from one national historical site to another on a bus, gushing and continuing to produce bumbling misstatements in the same unpracticed, overly demotic, and naively self-congratulatory style which has never served her well, you betcha!
To be a credible presidential candidate, Palin has needed to raise the level of her game above that of host of a day-time talk show program on some low-amperage local AM radio station. It seems increasingly evident that the elocution lessons with Professor Higgins that the Alaskan cockney flower girl has been needing to make her talk like a lady are just not happening. If Palin won’t make the effort to acquire significantly more polish and gravitas, she is inevitably going to be a walk over in a national election against Obama. Aging beauty queen charm and down home sweetness are never going to take Mrs. Malaprop all the way to the White House.
Mitt Romney passed state health insurance in Massachusetts and this week associated himself with Warmism. Romney is a good businessman and a highly competent manager, but he is gravely lacking in conservative cred. This election is going to be all about the fundamental direction of the country, about what happens once and for all about the entitlement state, about repealing Obamacare. The man who gave Taxachusetts its own version of Obamacare is not the standard-bearer the GOP needs in 2012.
The gossip is that Texas Governor Rick Perry is about to enter the race. What do we non-Texicans know about Perry? Not much. I seem to recall that he alluded once to the possibility of Texas seceding once again, but I think he was joking.
Thinking that its time to start forming some kind of opinions about Perry, I looked around and found a useful article by Kevin D. Williamson from National Review. On the whole, it makes Perry sound pretty good.
nice photo, too
The guy that NPR executives and the New York Times and your average Subaru-driving Whole Foods shopper were afraid George W. Bush was? Rick Perry is that guy. George W. Bush was Midland by way of Kennebunkport. Rick Perry’s people are cotton farmers from Paint Creek, a West Texas town so tiny and remote that my Texan traveling-salesman father looked at me skeptically and suggested I had the name wrong when I asked him whether he knew where it was. (Governor Perry confesses that one of the politiciany things he’s done in office is insisting that the Texas highway atlas include Paint Creek, making him the hometown boy who literally put the town on the map.) Bush is a Yalie, Perry is an Aggie. Bush served in the Texas Air National Guard, and Perry was a captain in the U.S. Air Force, flying C-130s in the Middle East. Bush has a gentleman’s ranch, Perry has the red meat. …
[H]e is a very different sort of man. Those who know both Bush and Perry say that Perry has even sharper political instincts — and none of the Bushes’ patrician compunction about deploying them.
A little patience, and we shall see the reign of witches pass over, their spells dissolve, and the people, recovering their true sight, restore their government to its true principles. It is true that in the meantime we are suffering deeply in spirit, and incurring the horrors of a war and long oppressions of enormous public debt. If the game runs sometimes against us at home we must have patience till luck turns, and then we shall have an opportunity of winning back the principles we have lost, for this is a game where principles are at stake.
–From a letter to John Taylor of Caroline (June 1798)
US News has the story via two military equipment blogs. It was the HK 416 which delivered a double dose of “77gr. of justice.”
The biggest secret in the special operations community—what gun did SEALs from “DevGru” kill Osama bin Laden with—has been revealed. Two military gear blogs, citing multiple insider sources, credit the highly reliable HK416 rifle, an M-16 type weapon, with the “double tap” of 5.56 mm bullets to bin Laden’s head.
While the military isn’t talking about what SEALs from United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group, formerly SEAL Team Six, carried in, two sites—Military Times Gear Scout and Soldier Systems—said the gun used was the German made, Delta Force designed Heckler & Koch rifle used by several militaries.
“I’ve just heard from a SOCOM vet,” says Military Times “He tells me the stack of SEAL assaulters from Red team that went through Osama bin Laden’s bedroom door were running HK416s.”
If you’ve been reading the standard firearms magazines in recent months, you’re read all about how terrific all the improvements made in the new Generation 4 Glock pistol are.
The great thing about the Internet is that the opinions expressed are typically considerably less influenced by advertising revenue. This little video has a very different perspective on the new Glock Gen4.
Tennessee has passed a measure making it a crime to transmit by telephone, in writing or by electronic communication an image that would cause “emotional distress†“without legitimate purpose.â€
“Emotional distress” is a standard of practically universal application. Anything at all might cause someone emotional distress, and there is no basis to determine whether someone experiences it, beyond his own say so.
What is and what is not a “legitimate purpose” also constitutes a legal nightmare. Who wants any judge to be permitted to decide what is and what isn’t legitimate?
Liberals are always arguing that we need to inform the American legal system with the superior wisdom of international jurisprudence.
From Brazil, comes the story of a court decision upholding the right of one Ana Catarina Silvares Bezerra, an accountant analyst who is allegedly afflicted with a female equivalent of satyriasis, to achieve personal gratification on company time, using the company’s computer and Internet access, for 15 minutes every 2 hours.
Fox News predicts that things are going to get very interesting for the Justice Department and BATF next week, when Congressional hearings put the spotlight on some amazingly botched efforts at gun control.
Officials at the Department of Justice are in “panic mode,” according to multiple sources, as word spreads that congressional testimony next week will paint a bleak and humiliating picture of Operation Fast and Furious, the botched undercover operation that left a trail of blood from Mexico to Washington, D.C.
The operation was supposed to stem the flow of weapons from the U.S. to Mexico by allowing so-called straw buyers to purchase guns legally in the U.S. and later sell them in Mexico, usually to drug cartels.
Instead, ATF documents show that the Bureau of Alcohol Tobacco and Firearms knowingly and deliberately flooded Mexico with assault rifles. Their intent was to expose the entire smuggling organization, from top to bottom, but the operation spun out of control and supervisors refused pleas from field agents to stop it.
Only after Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry died did ATF Agent John Dodson blow the whistle and expose the scandal.
“What people don’t understand is how long we will be dealing with this,” Dodson told Fox News back in March. “Those guns are gone. You can’t just give the order and get them back. There is no telling how many crimes will be committed before we retrieve them.”
But now the casualties are coming in.
Mexican officials estimate 150 of their people have been shot by Fast and Furious guns. Police have recovered roughly 700 guns at crime scenes, 250 in the U.S. and the rest in Mexico, including five AK-47s found at a cartel warehouse in Juarez last month.
A high-powered sniper rifle was used to shoot down a Mexican military helicopter. Two other Romanian-made AK-47s were found in a shoot-out that left 11 dead in the state of Jalisco three weeks ago.
The guns were traced to the Lone Wolf Gun Store in Glendale, Ariz., and were sold only after the store employees were told to do so by the ATF.
It is illegal to buy a gun for anyone but yourself. However, ATF’s own documents show it allowed just 15 men to buy 1,725 guns, and 1,318 of those were after the purchasers officially became targets of investigation.
If I could have my personal choice of one federal agency to defund or entirely abolish, I know which one it would be. I subscribe to the viewpoint that “Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms” ought to be the contents of the sign in the window of my local convenience store, not the name of a federal agency.
I have minimal expectations of this country’s depraved political class. But if you can’t draw the line at being ruled by creeps with a spambot penis, you can’t draw it anywhere.
Charles Francis Adams, Jr. (center) with other officers of the 1st Massachusetts Cavalry, 1864
The loquacious yet always gnomic Mencius Moldbug today served up a series of summer reading recommendations apparently intended to put the reader in a Mid-19th Century frame of mind.
Moldbug’s enticing reading list features political thought, travel accounts of Antebellum America, and some selections sympathetic to the perspective of the Confederacy.
I immediately perused (former Union officer) Charles Francis Adams Jr.’s 1902 defense of Robert E. Lee, Shall Cromwell Have a Statue? with much enjoyment.
Readers would be well-advised to try reading some (or all) of Moldbug’s selections.
Kevin Drum complains that we conservatives view lefties like himself unfairly.
Reading Tim Pawlenty’s paean to double plus supply-side-ism yesterday made me wonder, once again, why conservatives think we liberals are opposed to it. I mean, if it actually worked, why would we be? It’s politically popular, and by their accounts it would generate trillions of dollars in extra revenue that we could use to finance our beloved lefty social programs. What’s not to like?
The only answer I can come up with is that conservatives are now completely invested in their theory that we liberals loathe rich people so much that we don’t care. We all want to screw the wealthy so badly that we’re willing to forego the elections we’d win and the mountains of revenue we’d gain if we lowered their taxes. We hate them that much.
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This is an interesting example of mocking a proposition without actually denying it.
Barack Obama is an excellent representative of the same political philosophy held by Kevin Drum and he is renowned for explicitly advocating increased taxation for purposes of “fairness” even if higher rates resulted in lower growth and less revenue being collected. He said exactly that, and by so doing defined himself, in one of the most famous of his campaign debates.
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So, are we conservatives being unfair? Would left-wingers like Kevin Drum and Barack Obama ever really support tax cuts for wealthier Americans if that was what it took to grow the economy and provide government with the funding the left desires to spend?
The answer is No. Left-wingers will never accept the reality that growth can only be achieved by lower taxes. The notion that allowing the rich to keep more grows the economy and benefits all is unacceptable. The left has ridiculed and dismissed this commonsensical proposition as “trickle-down economics.”
Leftism is fundamentally based on envy and societal division, and its route to power relies on agitating the passions of the masses, on mobilizing them on the basis of their animosity toward those better off than themselves. A theory of economics that proposes that failing to punish the rich will make everyone better off fundamentally contradicts leftism’s basic methods and ideology.
The psychology of the left is one of bitter resentment and hatred of anyone better off than oneself. The true leftist would rather everyone were worse off, as long as no one was permitted to be better off than anyone else.
This is the classic peasant mentality, which is the subject of a thousand bitter Eastern European jokes.
“An angel appears to a poor peasant, and informs him that God has taken pity on his sufferings and has sent a messenger to relieve his hardships. The peasant, he is told, may make one wish, and the angel will grant his desire. There is, however, a catch. The angel informs the peasant that, whatever he wishes for, his neighbor will receive also, and that neighbor will be given twice as much. The peasant reflects a moment, and tells the angel: ‘Pluck out one of my eyes.'”
Martha Roth, dean of humanities at the University of Chicago, and Gil Stein, director of the Oriental Institute, examine ancient text.
The New York Times reports on the completion of one of the grand multigenerational academic projects.
Ninety years in the making, the 21-volume dictionary of the language of ancient Mesopotamia and its Babylonian and Assyrian dialects, unspoken for 2,000 years but preserved on clay tablets and in stone inscriptions deciphered over the last two centuries, has finally been completed by scholars at the University of Chicago.
This was the language that Sargon the Great, king of Akkad in the 24th century B.C., spoke to command what is reputed to be the world’s first empire, and that Hammurabi used around 1700 B.C. to proclaim the first known code of laws. It was the vocabulary of the Epic of Gilgamesh, the first masterpiece of world literature. Nebuchadnezzar II presumably called on these words to soothe his wife, homesick for her native land, with the promise of cultivating the wondrous Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
On all levels, this was the language of enterprise, the irrigation of lands and shipments of cultivated grain, and of fate foretold. Medical texts in Babylonia gave explicit instructions as to how to read a sheep’s liver to divine the future. …
This was probably the first writing system anywhere, and the city-states that arose in the Tigris and Euphrates River Valleys, mainly in what is present-day Iraq and parts of Syria, are considered the earliest urban and literate civilization. The dictionary, with 28,000 words now defined in their various shades of meaning, covers a period from 2500 B.C. to A.D. 100.
Oddly, for a work reflecting such meticulous research, its title, the Chicago Assyrian Dictionary, is an outdated misnomer. When the project was started in 1921 by James Henry Breasted, founder of the Oriental Institute, much of the written material in hand was attributed to Assyrian rulers. Also, biblical references left the impression that the term “Assyrian†was synonymous with most Semitic languages in antiquity, and so it is often used still to describe the academic field of study. Actually, the basic language in question is Akkadian.
And the dictionary is more of an encyclopedia than simply a concise glossary of words and definitions. Many words with multiple meanings and extensive associations with history are followed by page after page of discourse ranging through literature, law, religion, commerce and everyday life. There are, for example, 17 pages devoted to the word “umu,†meaning “day.â€
The word “ardu,†for slave, introduces extensive material available on slavery in the culture. And it may or may not reflect on the society that one of its more versatile verbs was “kalu,†which in different contexts can mean detain, delay, hold back, keep in custody, interrupt and so forth. The word “di nu,†like “case†in English, Dr. Cooper pointed out, can refer to a legal case or lawsuit, a verdict or judgment, or to law in general.
“Every term, every word becomes a window into the culture,†Martha T. Roth, dean of humanities at Chicago who has worked on the project since 1979 and has been its editor in charge since 1996, said last week.
Larry Bell, at Forbes, warns about a United Nations proposed global “Small Arms Treaty†premised to fight “terrorismâ€, “insurgency†and “international crime syndicates,” which he warns could dramatically increase registration and confiscation of firearms and ammunition in the United States.
While the terms have yet to be made public, if passed by the U.N. and ratified by our Senate, it will almost certainly force the U.S. to:
1. Enact tougher licensing requirements, creating additional bureaucratic red tape for legal firearms ownership.
2. Confiscate and destroy all “unauthorized†civilian firearms (exempting those owned by our government of course).
3. Ban the trade, sale and private ownership of all semi-automatic weapons (any that have magazines even though they still operate in the same one trigger pull – one single “bang†manner as revolvers, a simple fact the ant-gun media never seem to grasp).
4. Create an international gun registry, clearly setting the stage for full-scale gun confiscation.
5. In short, overriding our national sovereignty, and in the process, providing license for the federal government to assert preemptive powers over state regulatory powers guaranteed by the Tenth Amendment in addition to our Second Amendment rights.
There can be no doubt that international treaties of this sort represent the “nose under the tent” of efforts by the left to modify domestic laws and individual rights at the international level, in which Syria, Libya, and Cuba’s votes are added to those domestic democrats. Though there seems no real likelihood of any treaty of the kind Mr. Bell anticipates passing the US Senate at the present time, warning articles of this kind are prophylactic in preventing our ever getting to the point where US confirmation of such a treaty is a real prospect.
