And who can blame them?

LA Times:

The 51st state should be named South California, says Jeff Stone, a Republican on the the Riverside County Board of Supervisors. But the proposed 13 southern California counties that would split off from the Golden State would not include Los Angeles.

Stone told the Times’ Phil Willon that the ommission is intentional and is part of a plan that would make for a new conservative Californian state.

“Los Angeles is purposely excluded because they have the same liberal policies that Sacramento does. The last thing I want to do is create a state that’s a carbon copy of what we have now,” Stone said.

“Los Angeles just enacted a ban on plastic grocery bags. That put three or four manufacturers out of business,” Stone, a pharmacist from Temecula, said.

Stone plans on formally proposing secession Tuesday during a meeting of the Board of Supervisors.

South California would encompass Fresno, Imperial, Inyo, Kern, Kings, Madera, Mariposa, Mono, Orange, Riverside, San Bernardino, San Diego and Tulare counties, totaling approximately 13 million people.

The proposed 51st state would be the fifth largest by population, more populous than Illinois, Ohio and Pennsylvania. South California would take nearly a third of the population away from California, making the Golden State the second-largest state after Texas.

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The odd thing is: roughly the same thing happened 70 years ago. Four counties in Southern Oregon and three counties of Northern California, frustrated at the time by neglect of their interests by Sacramento & Eugene, wanted to secede and erect the new state of Jefferson.

They had gotten as far as issuing a declaration of independence, choosing a capitol (Yreka), and electing a governor when, Whoops!, along came the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Everyone was completely distracted by the entry of the United States into WWII, and the cause of the independence of the Cascades went a-begging.

From PackerBronco (one of Ann Althouse’s commenters):

These days, when the President says that we have to “eat our peas,” I no longer know whether he’s offering a metaphor or invoking the Commerce Clause.

“Eat our peas” occurs around 1:05

Member of the European Parliament from Southeast England Daniel Hannan in May 2009 explained to that body why bailouts wouldn’t work.

Mila Kunis

Ukrainian-born actress Mila Kunis has accepted an invitation posted recently on YouTube by Sgt. Scott Moore, currently serving in Afghanistan with the Third Battalion, Second Marines, to accompany him to the Marine Corps Ball next November 18th in Greenville, North Carolina.

Via HuffPo.

The American Progressives’ project of erecting a European-style welfare state is over, and it may be ending in default.

Chriss W. Street points out what the country’s real budget looks like (before Obamacare):

The Federal government’s spendable tax revenue of approximately $170 billion per month; is roughly just enough to cover legally required Social Security / Medicare payments ($90 billion) and debt service (ranging from $10-40 billon per month) – and the most politically sensitive payments for military and unemployment ($40 billion).

Read the whole thing. He has some good explanations of how we got here.

The US Army has invited gun makers to submit candidates for the next US primary long arm, which they intend to be a carbine.

The Army has given gun makers that want to build your next carbine 90 days to throw their hats in the ring. The message is clear: The Army isn’t looking for the lowest bidder, it’s looking for the most accurate, efficient, quiet, lethal and reliable weapon available.

Service leaders detailed what they want — and how they plan to get it — in a June 30 request for proposal. It seeks “an assault weapon that will provide accuracy, lethality, minimized visual and aural signature and survivability enhancements to all Army formations. … This weapon will possess the capability, in offensive and defensive operations, to destroy or neutralize the adversary and their capabilities, at any time and in any place.”

The RfP allows competitors to submit only one weapon for consideration. There are no caliber restrictions. Although many modern carbines are multicaliber weapons, they will compete with one caliber. And if a weapon’s caliber is not 5.56mm or 7.62mm, the manufacturer must provide 234,000 rounds to cover all tests.

Top performers will be identified by way of two down-select phases that will start this fall. Phase I will grade the weapons in three key areas:

• Technical aspects, such as the ability to mount existing weapons, optics and suppressor kits;

• The company’s ability to produce 2,000 and a surge of 4,200 carbines per month;

• Cost. The Army says performance factors are more important than price.

It is interesting to note that the Army specifies that they want a carbine.

Carbines are shorter, characteristically somewhat less accurate, versions of a rifle, used traditionally by mounted cavalry which would find carrying a full-length rifle awkward and inconvenient. Infantry are normally armed with rifles. Besides being more accurate, the full-length rifle is superior to the carbine in some other crucial respects. Inevitably in war, there are occasions when hand-to-hand combat occurs in which the infantryman’s rifle is required to be used in the capacity of a spear or a club. The rifle is more suitable for use with the bayonet, and being heavier than the carbine is more effective as a blunt weapon.

The current US Army does not expect any longer to march to battle on foot, and instead functions as motorized or air mobile infantry. The modern infantryman has, thus, become the equivalent of the 19th century dragoon who rode to battle on horseback, but dismounted and fought with carbine on foot.

Experience in the Middle East has demonstrated the inadequacy of the 5.56mm service round. Let’s hope that the Army comes to its senses this time and opts for a more serious cartridge.

Can’t exercise? Evidently you can always just drink red wine instead.

Lifehacker:

If you’re unable to exercise for a short time due to injury or some other reason, a glass of red wine might be good for you, a new study suggests. Resveratrol, an antioxidant found in most red wine, has been associated with less muscle and strength loss during inactivity.

Via Theo.

Thanks to commenter T.C. Carney (I have the best commenters!), we now know that Derek “Tex’ Grebner shot himself in the leg in the video I posted on July 7th, not with a pistol featuring a Glock-style trigger safety.

He was using a Kimber Pro Carry II, a premium adaptation, incorporating some of the features commonly found in customized upgrades, of the classic Colt Model 1911 chambered in .45 ACP.

Mr. Grebner experienced a “negligent discharge” (personally, I think there is a very strong association between these kind of f**kups and the mentality which emphasizes and places overreliance on pretentious jargon) while attempting to draw and fire his Kimber from “defensive retention” out of a 5.11 ThumbDrive Holster.

It was one of those “tactical,” black, kydex, ultra-macho-military klunky holsters that grips the gun, and has a button catch you have to push to release it.

The unfortunate Mr. Grebner was clearly a bit distracted, and was trying to perform a fast draw involving pushing on a holster retention button as well. It just might be that the 5.11 ThumbDrive Holster is not the optimal choice for many conventional automatic pistols, because that retention button happens to be located on the left side of the pistol right next to the safety on the Model 1911 (and many other pistols). So the hurrying Mr. Grebner apparently failed to release his Kimber from the holster, instead he clicked off the pistol’s side safety when he fumbled for the holster button.

The gun failed to release, and Mr. Grebner tells us that, as he pushed that button again, his finger “curled into the trigger guard, and [he] ripped a bullet into [his] leg.”

Ouch!

It must have hurt like hell, and Mr. Grebner was actually very lucky that the bullet penetrated at such an angle that it missed his femur and major blood vessels and then exited without causing a lot graver injury.

Accidents happen, of course. Mr. Grebner’s experience provides a warning to us all that guns are dangerous and we need to be alert and scrupulously careful in shooting at all times.

I personally do not like synthetic materials like kydex. I think kydex knife sheaths and holsters are both tacky and clunky, and I wouldn’t ever own one.

Tex Grebner explicitly declined to blame the holster, but obviously if you are going to try to draw fast, I’d say choosing a holster with a button release you have to push to get the gun out is a suboptimal choice. A retention button placed where it has some probability of being confused with the gun’s safety is also not a desirable feature.

The holster, of course, didn’t shoot Tex Grebner in the leg. He did it himself. Whatever problem one has getting the gun out of the holster, you still have to pay attention and be conscious of where your trigger finger is and what it’s doing. If your fast draw technique results in your finger inadvertently “curling into the trigger guard” and doing things you don’t know about, you are definitely doing something wrong, and can expect exactly this kind of thing to happen.

I would also say, that though it may be fun to develop a fast draw, who draws faster matters in general in Western movies and not in real life. In real life, it is far, far more common for anyone who ever needs to use a gun to have all the time in the world to draw carefully and take deliberate aim.

Tex Grebner, I think, deserves a lot of credit, though, for his forthrightness and considerable courage in releasing both videos, openly exposing a extremely embarrassing mishap, in the cause of making the rest of us think twice about gun safety. Best wishes to him for a quick recovery.

click on photo for larger image

Fred Lapides posted this with a joking comment that sometimes it’s better not to take the stairs.

He got it via CJDurrek, who made the same kind of I’ll-wait-for-the-elevator joke, and who also did not identify the actual location.

I researched a bit, but could not find a version of the photo with identification of the locale. My guess is that this is a photograph of the Huangshan steps.

Kyle Reed has a photoessay with shots that look pretty close.

I could be mistaken though.

James C. Capretta, at National Review, has a sense of déjà vu all over again, as democrats artfully attempt to induce Congressional Republicans to blink, or to at least win the PR battle, in the confrontation over raising the federal debt ceiling. Republicans caved before, he points out, resulting in the election of William Jefferson Clinton to the presidency.

As the debt-ceiling showdown heads into its final stages, the political maneuvering has intensified, with both sides seeking to gain the upper hand in the public-relations war. Leaders from both parties know the stakes in this fight are very, very high; confrontations of this sort tend to become defining moments in political life, for good or ill. At this stage, anything could still happen, with many scenarios still in play. But for Republicans, there are reasons to worry that this showdown could be headed toward a political and fiscal debacle if they are not very careful.

It wouldn’t be the first time Democrats got the better of Republicans in a budget fight. In 1990, Richard Darman, who was director of the Office of Management and Budget, wanted to strike a budget deal to bring projected budget deficits down by $500 billion over five years. As a precondition for entering the talks, however, Democratic Senate majority leader George Mitchell demanded that Pres. George H. W. Bush renege, in writing, on his “no new taxes” pledge. The president did so at Darman’s urging, and from that moment on, the president’s standing and leverage plummeted. At crucial moments in the ensuing process, the tax increases kept getting larger and more onerous, and the spending cuts and entitlement reforms kept getting more ephemeral. In the end, it was just a question of how bad the political fallout would be for the president, which of course turned out to be very bad indeed.

In the current fight, it’s quite clear what President Obama and his allies are trying to accomplish. First, they want a package upon which the president can campaign in 2012. Something on the order of a “$3 trillion deficit-cutting program” (no matter how phony) — or even $2 trillion — would help the president downplay the big-spending, liberal image that most independent voters now have of him.

Second, the president wants to raise taxes without getting blamed for it. Hence the disingenuous cat-and-mouse games aimed at luring Republicans into accepting tax hikes behind closed doors so that the president never actually has to take ownership of them before they become law. Quite a trick if he can get away with it.

Third, and most important, Democrats want a deal that doesn’t give an inch on what really matters to their voting base — which is the entitlement status quo. The Democratic party has come to define itself as the party of entitlements. The New Deal. The Great Society. Obamacare. Nothing gets the Democratic heart beating quite like ensnaring the entire American middle class in entitlement dependence. For Democrats, victory means forcing Republicans to accept a budget framework that leaves today’s entitlement superstructure — and most especially centralized government management of American health care — exactly as it is today. ….

It would be far better to find a way to cut whatever spending can be cut sensibly with some Democratic support, raise the debt limit modestly, and leave the big questions on entitlement reforms and taxes to the collective judgment of the voting public in 2012.

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Glenn Reynolds adds:

So driving home from the gym just now, I heard Rush Limbaugh saying that if the GOP caves on the debt-ceiling fight we’ll see a Tea Party-backed third-party candidate for President, and the RNC will “implode” for lack of contributions. I think that’s right, but I don’t think that will happen. …

[T]he Democrats aren’t holding very many cards, and there’s no reason for the GOP to fold under the threat. Which isn’t to say that they won’t fold anyway, of course. As Teddy Roosevelt once said about Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr., I could carve a better backbone out of a banana. . . .

Arnold Böcklin, Im Spiel der Wellen [At Play in the Waves], 1883, Bayerische Staatsgemäldesammlungen Munich, Neue Pinakothek

It’s a good idea to look in from time to time at the Polish art blog Spod pÄ™dzla (pronounced “Spod pendzla,” and meaning “from the brush”). “Estees” comes up with some very amusing items, like this Symbolist painting of mermaids in the process of being sexually harassed by two male mythological beings by the Swiss painter Arnold Böcklin (1827 – 1901).

The German history & images source GHDI supplies some information and context:

In 1899, when the craze for Arnold Böcklin’s work was in full swing, the art historian Cornelius Gurlitt (the brother of Böcklin’s Berlin dealer Fritz Gurlitt) wrote that the German public regarded this painting as “one of the greatest achievements of our century.” When it was painted in 1883, art critics had been less sure. Enthusiasm for the painting had grown, however, by the time of its showing at the Third Munich International in 1888. Offering his interpretation of the work, Ferdinand Avenarius of Der Kunstwart declared that the worried mermaid being pursued by the laughing triton personified the ocean itself and the natural forces of water and sky. Actually, a rather ordinary episode in the artist’s life appears to have provided the immediate inspiration for this composition. Böcklin had been swimming in Italy with the family of Anton Dohrn, the zoologist who commissioned Hans von Marées’s Oarsmen. Dohrn dove into the waves, swam some distance underwater, and suddenly resurfaced near the women in the bathing party. The ladies’ surprise caught Böcklin’s fancy, and he decided to portray a similar scene drawn from the world of mythical underwater creatures. His compostion thrusts the viewer into the rising and falling waves, which are shown without the slightest hint of land in the distance. Dohrn’s features can actually be seen in the face of the triton, whose freely expressed and ribald intentions make this the most playful of Böcklin’s works. In the early years of the twentieth-century, when overzealous members of the moral purity movement were subject to ridicule and denouncement, In the Play of the Waves offered ample basis for caricature – moral zealots, complete with fig leaves, were shown swimming into the frame of the painting in order to arrest the mermaids.

It is clearly a centaur puffing and paddling vigorously after two mermaids in the rear, while a more relaxed, and more completely submerged, lustful triton is leering lasciviously as he closes upon the person of a far-more-refined and delicate mermaid, who looks decidedly dismayed by his clearly inescapable advances.