I am a strong believer in the second amendment. I like guns. I think everyone who is not mentally deficient or a criminal and is over 18 (or possibly 21) should own one, at least.

American Daughter has an interesting post on the differences between US gun ownership and Swiss gun ownership. The Swiss come out way ahead.

And the “Why no one invades Switzerland video” that my husband liked so much is also there. (And now here.)

transcript of Rick Santelli’s discussion

Market Ticker

Business Week said:

The U.S. Treasury and Labor Departments will ask for public comment as soon as next week on ways to promote the conversion of 401(k) savings and Individual Retirement Accounts into annuities or other steady payment streams, according to Assistant Labor Secretary Phyllis C. Borzi and Deputy Assistant Treasury Secretary Mark Iwry, who are spearheading the effort.

And this is why the survivalists are gaining traction.

I have an old friend who is converting his life time savings into gold, silver, ammunition, booze and other non-perishable staples for what he believes is the inevitable “economic crunch.” I hope he is wrong that it is imminent, but at least now he can rest easy knowing that the government can’t get to his nest egg, and based upon the recent price of ammunition and gold/silver it is appreciating nicely.

from the Rofasix

By the way, this was proposed in 2008 in Argentina and is now fact in Argentina.

If we’re going the way of Argentina, we are in a world of hurt.

[O]n March 14, 2008, then Sen. Obama voted in favor of the 2009 budget which authorized $3.1 trillion in federal outlays along with a projected $400 billion deficit. The 51-44 vote that morning was strongly along party lines with only two Republicans saying “Yes.”
When the final conference report was presented to the House on June 5, not one Republican voted for it.
This means the 2009 budget was almost exclusively approved by Democrats, with “Yeas” coming from current President then Sen. Obama, his current Vice President then Sen. Joe Biden, his current Chief of Staff then Rep. Rahm Emanuel, and his current Secretary of State then Sen. Hillary Clinton.
How is this possibly something that happened before Obama “walked in the door” when his Party ramrodded the original budget through Congress with virtually no Republican approval — save Bush’s signature, of course — and the highest members of the current Administration — including the president himself!!! — supported it when they were either in the Senate or the House?
Sadly, Obama-loving media care not to address this inconvenient truth.
But that’s just the beginning…

Read the rest.

I do think he can blame some of it on Bush. Bush, after all, chose to sign the legislation that not a single Republican voted for. That says something about Bush’s shift to the left that I hadn’t thought about before.

Found via the Common Room.

Scientists used and re-used this information without ever checking it. I am guessing part of the reason for the lack of checking (especially since it was never published in a peer-reviewed journal which should have checked it) is that it matched what the scientists were expecting to find and so they accepted it.

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Doesn’t that tell you more about science being subjective than you wanted to know?

I found this on Watts Up With That. It includes several screen captures of British papers on the topic.

a president who entered office with enormous support and an unprecedented amount of goodwill.

The Commentary is talking about Obama.

He got 53% of the vote. I’m not sure that is enormous support. He did get 8 million more votes than McCain. Of course, in a country of 305 million people, an amazingly high 127 million voted.

That’s over a third of the population, which includes children!

http://thestar.com.my/news/story.asp?file=/2010/1/20/worldupdates/2010-01-20T080717Z_01_NOOTR_RTRMDNC_0_-455265-3&sec=Worldupdates

It says it is copyrighted in 2008.

It also says Coakley conceded. No one else does though.

The Denver Post says he won.

Is this a Dewey-Truman moment? We’ve already had those. One news center posted election returns yesterday.

Subject: French view of US Military by Jean-Marc Liotier

The original French article is available, but this is part of the translation I found at Blackfive:

And that is a first shock to our preconceptions: the American soldier is no individualist. The team, the group, the combat team are the focus of all his attention. And they are impressive warriors! We have not come across bad ones, as strange at it may seem to you when you know how critical French people can be. Even if some of them are a bit on the heavy side, all of them provide us everyday with lessons in infantry know-how. Beyond the wearing of a combat kit that never seem to discomfort them (helmet strap, helmet, combat goggles, rifles etc.) the long hours of watch at the outpost never seem to annoy them in the slightest. On the one square meter wooden tower above the perimeter wall they stand the five consecutive hours in full battle rattle and night vision goggles on top, their sight unmoving in the directions of likely danger. No distractions, no pauses, they are like statues nights and days. At night, all movements are performed in the dark – only a handful of subdued red lights indicate the occasional presence of a soldier on the move. Same with the vehicles whose lights are covered – everything happens in pitch dark even filling the fuel tanks with the Japy pump.
…
This is the main area where I’d like to comment. Anyone with a passing knowledge of Kipling knows the lines from Chant Pagan: ‘If your officer’s dead and the sergeants look white/remember it’s ruin to run from a fight./So take open order, lie down, sit tight/And wait for supports like a soldier./ This, in fact, is the basic philosophy of both British and Continental soldiers. ‘In the absence of orders, take a defensive position.’ Indeed, virtually every army in the world.

The American soldier and Marine, however, are imbued from early in their training with the ethos: In the Absence of Orders: Attack! Where other forces, for good or ill, will wait for precise orders and plans to respond to an attack or any other ‘incident’, the American force will simply go, counting on firepower and SOP to carry the day. This is one of the great strengths of the American force in combat and it is something that even our closest allies, such as the Brits and Aussies (that latter being closer by the way) find repeatedly surprising. No wonder it surprises the hell out of our enemies.

Worth watching.

based on religion are becoming more common. Perhaps I would not notice them except that they are discriminating against my religion.

from American Daughter:

Army Lieutenant General William “Jerry” Boykin openly expressed his Christian world-view in public…. But negative coverage of his public expressions of his faith by the liberal mainstream media brought an end to his distinguished 36-year military career, and forced his retirement.

Army Major Nidal Hasan also held strong religious views. A devout Muslim, he openly expressed his approval of a jihad, or holy war, against western culture and our way of life. He even had business cards that declared him a soldier of Allah. … His outcome was the killing of thirteen people at the Fort Hood military base in Texas.

The Anchoress on climate change.

I will be ashamed if my readers did not already know (as we have discussed for years) that the Global Warming Hoax was/is, as we have always know it to be, a hoax. An effort to defraud nations and assist in the tireless (and creative) leftist international movement

Or, that seems to be the general trend of the news.

One suspects this hacking had much to do with the sudden collapse of the world-wide global warming boondoggle and economic manipulation and “global management” movements that have been so wildly trumpeted by international scallywags of all stripes and ambitions.

Aren’t you glad, now, that the moron cowboy saw through it and was smart enough to keep us out of the unworkable and failed Kyoto treaty, despite worldwide pressure and ceaseless hysteria from the moron press?

Big Lizards on marital-phobic Dems.

“Yes, this structure can create a ‘marriage penalty’ for some couples. It also creates a ‘marriage bonus’ for others,” [Jim Manley, a Reid spokesman] said. “A married couple with one wage earner can earn up to $250,000 without facing this higher tax, whereas a single person in the same job with the same pay would be hit by it.”

But a married couple in which each earner makes $150,000 would be hit with the tax, whereas an unmarried couple living together with the same incomes would not.

Thank you who served and you who supported them while they served.

Miss England is a corporal in the British army and a veteran of the Iraq war.

I may have to watch the Miss World (or whatever) pageant this year just to cheer her on.

American.com asks and answers the question, Are liberals smarter than Conservatives?

A conservative is defined (in the study discussed) as:

The Conservative syndrome describes a person who attaches particular importance to the respect of tradition, humility, devoutness and moderation; as well as to obedience, self-discipline and politeness, social order, family, and national security; and has a sense of belonging to and a pride in a group with which he or she identifies. A Conservative person also subscribes to conventional religious beliefs and accepts the mystical, including paranormal, experiences.

Okay. I’m a conservative.

The discussion says things that include:

As long as smarter people are more likely to be skeptical of tradition, then full-blown rejection of tradition will almost inevitably be correlated with higher IQ, even if a majority of smart people still favor traditionalism.
…
To reiterate, people who subscribe to non-traditional ideas probably have above-average intellects, but that does not mean other smart people will like those ideas. This is a point often lost on liberals who work in universities or in the news media. They observe, usually correctly, that friends and acquaintances in their social circle are smarter than the average (and likely more conservative) people they encounter on the street. But too many elites see this correlation between smartness and liberalism as somehow a validation of their political views. They seem unaware that the wider world features plenty of intelligent people who are not professors or movie critics or government bureaucrats. Even among the nation’s smartest people, liberal elites could easily be in the minority politically, but different social circles keep them insulated from finding that out.

A great story on Clayton Cramer’s blog about liability issues, guns, and bathtubs in a law school class.

I like what the student said and did. The results are fascinating.

And I really like Clayton Cramer’s response. “[T]here need to be mandatory bathtub safety classes before parents are allowed to rent or buy a place with one of those porcelain dealers of death.”

Because they chose Barak Obama for the Nobel Peace Prize based on his diplomacy.

Why America Doesn’t Believe the President is an interesting and effective compilation of various authors to show why health care reform has lost popularity… And why people think Obama is lying.

After two different ACORN groups supported a pimp and the sexual exploitation of minor illegal immigrants, the Census Bureau of the US has finally dumped the activist group. It’s about time.

Too bad they’re still earmarked for millions from the federal government.

ALI BASE, Iraq – Airmen from the 407th Air Expeditionary Group assembled school supplies and toys for Operation Iraqi Child Sept. 5, 2009. The school supplies will be distributed to local communities in southern Iraq to prepare children for the upcoming school year. (Photo by / Airman 1st Class Tony R. Ritter)

The 407th wanted you to see some pictures from their latest school-supplies drive. You can read about it and see additional photos here.

As a reminder, this effort has been wholly the work of the airmen and their families. If you’d like to help, you can mail school supplies to:

1Lt Korry Leverett
407 AEG/PA
APO AE 09331

from Blackfive

I find this particularly funny because I referenced Dragnet last week in class and none of my students knew what I was talking about.

Did they really say those things, or did the guys do voice overs?

Go to Tim Hawkins and click on “The Government Can.”

Grins.