Oct 12, 2010

Tom Mix

He killed himself in a car crash  seventy years ago today, not far from Florence, Arizona.

Tom Mix, Texas native, working cowboy,  marshall, Texas Ranger, veteran of the nation's wars.

Ayup.

Don't you just hate the revisionist nitpickers who re-edited that bio from Tom's  press agent? Pennsylvania kid. Army deserter. Most heroic military and/or law enforcement  position held: drum major.

Oct 8, 2010

Competence in South Africa

Our buddy Wouter in Capetown is a shooter, home improver, electronics geek, a jack of most, if not all, trades.  Good thing, and a good thing also that he runs with a pack of similarly competent men and women.

It takes a crowd like that to put together an international steel shoot more or less from scratch, conquering all obstacles with salvaged wire, borrowed equipment, and a can-do mindset which even allowed for reasonable handling of a strange Finn.

As a side note, the USA is listed as a  IMSSU member but we didn't seem to have anyone at the South African shoot.

...and bacon is an option

Krispy Kreme cheeseburger ? Well I'm  damned.

Iowa is a great place to damage arteries and other vitals this weekend. On the other hand, if you seek tall and tan and young and lovely, you might want to consider Rio.
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Oct 5, 2010

Get lost, Washington

A guy really hates to say anything nice about California, but since I'm about to praise Montana and Arizona again, it would be gauche to decline a nod of approval to the Golden Bear.

Proposition 19  could pass, sending California before the federal long robes, just like Montana with its Firearms Freedom Act and Arizona, where citizens decided to take it on themselves to repair the massive federal immigration cockup.

The strictly legal points in all three cases seem to center on the Constitution's supremacy clause. Morally they test our cherished cultural myth that laws require the consent of the governed, not to mention the abuse to which malum   prohibitum   statutes are  prone.

Malum prohibitum?  Wrong because there's a law against it, period.  In 1961, for instance, Sammy Davis Junior married May Britt. If he had done so in Virginia both he and Britt would  have been felons, guilty of miscegenation.

Malum in se laws are what we're after. They  prohibit acts which are evil in and of themselves, like stealing  a Twinkie from your buddy's lunch box or auctioning off a senate seat in Illinois.

In one way or another, the Arizona, California,  and Montana laws, reflect a popular revolt against the mala prohibita which is too often a simple lust for federal political control of the citizenry or of local jurisdictions.

I don't know how any of the three issues will be resolved, of course.  I suspect the firearms freedom acts will fail and that the courts will  gut Arizona's immigration control drive. The California initiative to legalize personal marijuana use for adults is said to be a dead heat this week. If it happens to pass, I'd give it at least a slim chance of judicial approval.

But the results are less interesting that the grass-roots pressure. Libertarian thought -- even among those who couldn't define "libertarian"  -- seems to have come a long way.

EDIT: An Ipso poll just reported has Proposition 19 down, 53-43.