"Innocents Betrayed" Ships!
"Let me tell you what I tell everyone who walks in here. The law is powerless to help you... powerless to help you, not to punish you." -- Chief Wiggum
JPFO Alerts - It's Here: Innocents Betrayed--JPFO's documentary film is shipping now! - You can order your own copy on VHS or DVD for $29.95 via the information on this page. Or just call 800-869-1884, listen to a long-winded announcement, and leave your order information. [jpfo]
Massad Ayoob at Backwoods Home Magazine - 1911: The classic homeland security pistol - history, contemporary perspective, good modern brands, effective loads and how to inexpensively practice for using them. A good overview of John Browning's self defense masterpiece.
Countless tales of up close and personal pistol fighting emerged from WWI. The bottom line was that when Americans shot Germans with Colt .45 automatics, the Germans tended to fall down and die. When Germans shot Americans with their 9mm Luger pistols, the Americans tended to become indignant and kill the German who shot them, and then walk to an aid station to either die a lingering death or recover completely. Thus was born the reputation of the .45 automatic as a "legendary manstopper," and the long-standing American conviction that the 9mm automatic was an impotent wimp thing that would make your wife a widow if you trusted your life to it.
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One big advantage of cocked and locked carry is that it mandates the gun be "on safe." If the wrong person gets the gun away from you, he has to figure out which of those little levers "turns on the gun." This will buy you time to either rectify the situation up close and personal or run a considerable distance, either of which beats hell out of the bad guy holding a "point gun, pull trigger" weapon on you at contact distance.
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When I first visited hunting ranches in Texas, I had expected to see the hands and the guides carrying Colt Peacemakers and Magnum revolvers. Not hardly; almost every man-jack among these working cowboys wore a 1911 .45 auto tucked in the waistband of their jeans or on the front seat of the pickup truck beside them.
David Dieteman at LewRockwell.com - The President's Address: A Suggested Script - instead of asking for $86 more deficit spending, if Bushnev had any honor, he would have resigned. He doesn't of course, so we'll get at least another year and a half of war, and four more after that if he manages to beat the idiot communists running against him. [lew]
Please understand that I step down not only because of the harmful and expensive war which I unleashed, but because the federal government has exceeded its revenue by more than $450 billion this year. California Governor Gray Davis is being recalled for a much lesser shortfall, and he does not have Alan Greenspan or a printing press. I am, therefore, stepping aside to allow others to right the fiscal ship of state.
Politech - John Gilmore on Politech changes and NOT obfuscating email addresses - John Gilmore (gnu@toad.com) doesn't buy into the idea of attempting to reduce spam by obfuscating your email address on web pages. He thinks filtering, or, better, creating a cheaper way for the spammers to target people who want to receive their messages, is a better solution to the problem.
John Gilmore - What to do about spam in general? Use reader-oriented tools - why Mr. Gilmore is working on Grokmail.
The part that virtually nobody understands is that spam isn't going to go away. It's like the drug war -- the more you ratchet up the penalties against innocent people, the more innocent people are hurt -- but there's still money in it for the malicious. People are clearly sending spam because it works for their purposes: even if it pisses off 99.99% of recipients, they make back their costs and more, from the tiny minority who DID wish to receive it.
We have built a communication system that lets anyone in the world send information to anyone else in the world, arriving in seconds, at any time, at an extremely low and falling cost. THIS WAS NOT A MISTAKE! IT WAS NOT AN ACCIDENT! The world collectively has spent trillions of dollars and millions of person-years, over hundreds of years, to build this system -- because it makes society vastly better off than when communication was slow, expensive, regional, and unreliable. 150 years ago, warriors killed civilians and each other for months after the combatants had signed peace treaties, because the news of peace had not reached them yet. Even a decade ago, a friend of mine died of a rare cancer, because the existing Japanese research paper that showed how to treat it wasn't findable in time by his US doctors. These are just the tiny tip of an iceberg of problems and inefficiencies that rapid cheap worldwide communication has solved.
John Ross at The Missouri Shooter - In Many Ways, Things Are Better for Us [Gun Owners] Now Than They Ever Have Been in the Past. - A speech Mr. Ross gave in January of this year. A short history of the availability of firearms in the United States concluding that we've made significant strides in the direction of more liberty. From a link in this Claire Files post, which is worth reading. [clairefiles]
