I think the Brady Campaign is drawing a rather bizzare conclusion from the latest Rasumussen poll. Must be the Montezuma getting to them.
Author: Sebastian
Flat Earthers
Seal: It’s What’s For Dinner
There’s a controversy up in the Great White North about whether restaurants ought to be serving seal meat. Personally, if you’re killing the animal for the fur, what’s the sense in wasting the rest of the animal if people want to eat it?
He has since taken a deep, almost protective interest in the way seal reaches his restaurant, traveling to the islands to meet the hunters, and visiting the abattoir where the meat is butchered. Mr. Lenglet also sought out local purveyors who could smoke the meat.
You can smoke seal? Hey, I have a smoker now. Seal BBQ anyone? Apparently it has a somewhat fishy taste, which is odd for a mammal, but I’m guessing it’s because seals eat mainly fish.
On the Blogosphere 2.0
Megan McArdle points out this interesting article over at 11D on where blogs have evolved to, that I think is largely correct. Here are some interesting points, but go read the whole thing:
1. The A-List Doesn’t Matter Anymore. I just read a really nice paper that came up with a new method for determining the top 20 bloggers.[…]
I think this is mostly correct, but I wouldn’t discount the fact that most of these blogs have traffic into the stratosphere compared to niche blogs like mine, or even SayUncle’s for that matter. The A-Listers still matter, but my understanding from Bitter, who was doing this long before me, is that the assertion that A-List blogs don’t drive the readers they used to is true. Many of their original blogs have also disappeared, and were subsumed by new media projects like Pajamas Media, or Hot Air.
2. It’s all about niche blogs. If you have a particular expertise and unique perspective, they you can quickly gain a following. Everyone else is out of luck.
This is absolutely true, and largely because there will never be another Instapundit. The nature of the ‘sphere has changed too much, and I don’t think anyone who’s not a niche blog is going to be able to rise to that level. When I “blogged” on LiveJournal, I covered generic political topics and guns occaistionally.  When I launched into blogging two and a half years ago, I stuck strictly to gun blogging because I thought it was the only area I’d have a unique perspective to offer.
3. Norms and practices. Bloggers have undermined the blogosphere. Bloggers do not link to each other as much as they used to.
This is true, and it makes it a lot harder for someone to become successful in this medium. I would have not found success if it hadn’t been for SayUncle and Bitter, who linked to me heavily in the beginning. The problem is, finding things to link to is extremely time consuming. I have several dozen blogs on my RSS feed, and it’s been whittled down as of late because I couldn’t keep up with everything. I have 785 unread posts in total right now, even with a reduced number of blogs. There’s no way I can go through everything.
4. Blogger Burn Out. Many of the top bloggers have been absorbed into some other professional enterprise or are burnt. It’s a lot of work to blog. Most bloggers, and not just the A-listers, spend 3-5 hours every day blogging. That’s hard to maintain, especially since there is no money in this.
It’s true. It takes a tremendous amount of work to find things to blog about. Truth is, since Bitter is no longer blogging, she helps me with that a great deal. I probably couldn’t keep this up if she weren’t constantly scouring Al Gore’s Internets during the day looking for things. If she ends up getting a job, it will cut down my free time in the evenings and in the mornings greatly if I have to do this all myself. Having Bitter largely stop gun blogging, and having one of us unemployed, is good for the blogging, and taking the pressure off me.
9. Link Monitoring. In the past, I could easily figure out which blogs had linked to me and then send them a reciprocal link. For whatever reasons, Google Blog and Technorati aren’t picking up the smaller blogs, and I have no idea who’s linking to me.
This is a big pet peeve of mine. Technorati tracking is no longer worth squat, and Google picks up too many useless spam blogs, forcing me to have to pick through to find the real people who are linking. In the past, linking was a way to get noticed, and way to keep a conversation moving through the blogosphere. A great traffic driver was writing something everyone else wanted to talk about. Now I have little idea who’s linking to me. Trackbacks are pretty much dead too, thanks to trackback spammers.
Happy Pre-Independence Day
If you’re like me, you don’t have work today, since July 4th falls on a Saturday. NRA has a pretty good Independence Day message from Charleton Heston. It’s old, obviously, but few people could speak like he could. It’s worth watching.
Bloomberg Campaign Commercial
He has Carolyn McCarthy shilling for him. I guess she is incapable of running on anything other than her hatred for guns and gun owners.
Who’s Drinking Beer?
A guide to which states consume the most beer. Seems that Montana, New Hampshire, North Dakota and Nevada drink more than most. You’d think for people that drink so much beer, Montana would have better microbreweries. Maybe this is my excuse to move out there.
Parking Lot Thing in Arizona
Dustin looks at all the successes this year. Many of these are great victories, but among those are the Parking Lot bill. From the “not sure why NRA makes this a priority” department, the Goldwater Institute, normally a friend of gun rights, is planning on challenging the legitimacy of the law.
“The Goldwater Institute strongly supports the right to keep and bear arms,” Bolick stated, adding that the Institute filed a brief in Heller v. District of Columbia, the U.S. Supreme Court case that strengthened Second Amendment rights. “But it is a right against government, not against private individuals. This bill does violence to private property rights.”
As I’ve said, I don’t think the issue is really about property rights, but is really about employment law. Whatever is in your car is your property, and your employer has no legal power to search your vehicle. But your employer doesn’t have to continue a relationship with you if you do something that’s a violation of the employee agreement. That employers bar guns in their workplaces and on their property is no more a violation of my right to bear arms than if a friend has the same rule for his house. My response to a friend who wanted to search my vehicle would be the same as it would be to an employer, namely a to very nicely and politely tell them to go to hell.
As a society, we do accept government intrusion into the employer/employee relationship for a number of things, chief among those to prevent discrimination. But that is a special case. As a rule, I’m not comfortable with the government interfering in private relationships. It is a restriction on freedom of association that should not occur in a free society. There are better ways to make companies reconsider anti-gun policies than by government meddling in private relationships.
On the Original Purpose of the Second Amendment
Let’s say that a future government has decided to incarcerate wrong thinking people into “reeducation camps,” to try to get people thinking right, and to quietly “take care” of all those who can’t be rehabilitated. Free speech is suppressed, the media made an arm of the state, and the government refuses to stand for free and fair elections. In that situation, most people would recognize the government has forfeited any claim to legitimacy. We fought a World War, and a risky, expensive, and protracted cold war against such governments. Most people, I would wager, would agree such a government ought to be resisted, and violently if necessary. But I have to question how some view the form that would take on.
Do folks really believe that if the proverbial shit were to hit the fan, that the people will prevail by the people bringing out their privately owned tanks, RPGs, anti-tank missiles, artillery, mortars, F-16s, helicopter gunships, surface-to-air missiles, to fight and defeat a modern army, or even part of one, on its own terms in conventional military operations? I would posit that warfare has changed a great deal since 1776, and even if the courts agreed the Second Amendment protected all of these things, it would be entirely symbolic and meaningless. Very few people could afford them, or even if they could afford them, they wouldn’t own such things in large enough numbers to make any real difference.
This is not to say that I think the Second Amendment’s purpose of enabling people to resist a criminal government is completely obsolete, just that it’s not going to happen the same way it did in 1776, only with modern weapons. Any resistance to a criminal government in the modern age will take conventional small arms, explosives, information, intelligence, and will. Small arms we have to ensure are protected under the Second Amendment. Explosives are impossible to control in such a situation, and will be available no matter what laws regulate them under a legitimate government. Intelligence and will are organizational qualities that are unrelated to arms. Hell, I would argue that the ability to tinker with model airplanes is more important to the modern concept of “militia” than knowing the principles of artillery, and knowing RF communication principles far more important than knowing logistics.
In the history of 20th century warfare, this has played out more than a few times. The Vietcong engaged in an extensive and largely successful guerrilla campaign, with only what their fighters could carry on their backs. In fact, the fatal mistake of the Vietcong was to come out of the jungle, and fight an offensive against the U.S. military on conventional terms. Militarily, Tet was a defeat for the VC, and it destroyed them as a fighting force. But Tet broke the American will, and in that sense was not a failure. It is, however, a harsh lesson what happens when a guerrilla force tries to fight a conventional army on its own terms.
What I advocate here is not an extinction of the original purpose of the Second Amendment, but to emphasise that the priority has to be on protecting conventional small arms. I don’t think whether destructive devices are protected or not really makes all that much difference in the overall scheme of things. The nature of modern warfare has not made the Second Amendment’s “defense against tyrannical government” obsolete, but it has changed the equation enough that appeals to how things were in 1776 aren’t much use in figuring out how it would be applied in a modern context.
I’ve Always Wondered Too
Arizona Rifleman wonders why commie bloc ammo smells so bad. I’ve always figured it was the priming compound they use. I’ve noticed that even with .22 ammo, there’s a difference in smell between, say, federal, and anything that is Eley primed. Could be the powder, but even the cheap Eley primed Mexican ammo smells this way.