Caucus morn on my electric teevee

They're all here. The cameras are on. I am siamesed to my new flat screen, listening to Them tell Me what I am like.

I am beginning to feel like one of Margaret Mead's Ta'u village girls.

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Armed Iowa, one year later

Happy Birthday. One year ago yesterday, "shall-issue" became Iowa law. You've read of  the resultant carnage, so there's no need to repeat it here.

Our largest newspaper -- the anti-gun Des Moines Register* --  decided it needed a year-end retrospective and produced what was presumably the most horrifying summary it could print without generating a collective horse laugh from the Mississippi to the Missouri. It headlined the "Unbelievable" number of new ccw permits in 2011.

Turns out the unbelievability head is based on this quotation:

“ 'It’s unbelievable,' (Cerro Gordo Sheriff Kenneth Pals) said. 'It hasn’t slowed. The permits used to be one-year permits. Now they are good for five years'.”

But try as it might, the Register couldn't dredge up enough to cite even one case of a CCW holder misusing a weapon. (I found one early in the year. Some CCW guy got  tight and waved his piece around in a bar. He's now, rightfully, a former CCW holder. That's all the mayhem I could find, so I suppose shall-issue hasn't  stacked corpses in our schools, orphanages, and  Burger Chef's.)

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And then there's the nation's Capital where they store, but rarely read, the Constitution, where gore was to clog the sewers after the Heller decision a little more than two years ago. Err, the  Washington murder rate is down.

If you decide to read that report you may savor the reasons given by Mayor Gray and Police Chief Lanier. They explain that homicides fell because of the excellent work of Mayor Gray and Police Chief Lanier. I'm sure that's true because there is no possibility that armed thugs might think twice about  throwing down on a victim who might shoot back.


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*I rag on the Register quite often, sometimes unairly so.  I found its coverage of the shall-issue debate last year pretty objective, and I can find little to fault in its news coverage of the Ron Paul campaign

Christmas in America

Borepatch ferreted out a social network thread from lads and lasses in the shadow of the family tree. A sample indicates the rollicking good spirits of our twittery youth.

Sean McWhosis announces to the world: "my parents are the worst  Mother F-----g parents in the world for not getting me an iPhone f--- you Mom and Dad F--- YOU. FML."(elisions mine)


That's only slightly more vulgar and illiterate than the rest of the comments, and if you're interested in nurturing a foul pessimism about tomorrow's voters and breeders, I suggest you read it all.

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Look you self-righteous little pukes, once upon a time, not all that long ago,  plastered across America, even during the Christmas season, you saw things like this, and you didn't take it as a license to call your parents or your society  motherf.....s.

Focus, group.

The TMR annual refresher. It is a reminder, mainly to its author, of why it exists:

Three  kinds of people exist. 

(1) Authoritarians -- stunted cretins who  wish to use government to dictate the manner in which you live your  life

(2) Libertarians -- the opposite, believers in personal sovereignty, men and women who assume ownership of and responsibility for their own lives. 

(3) Inerts --  The rest. The wad which, in return for unearned potted chickens,  puts authoritarians in power.

We're here to fight the authoritarians. Everything else -- however diverting or amusing it might sometimes be -- is just padding.