I use a Palm handheld — I’ve been using them since around 1998. These use a specific type of handwriting recognition called “Graphitti”, which basically entails the user learning to write in a slightly modified uppercase. Just a few minutes ago, while making a correction to an address book entry, I quickly wrote out the name “Smith”.
Somehow it came out “Shit”.
I guess my Graphitti skills still need a little work.
Gut Rumbles has A funny(ish) dog story today. It reminded me of an encounter I had once upon a time….
I once came home to find my yellow labrador with her head stuck shoulder-deep in a large Milkbone box she’d fished out of the trash. Apparently it had been there for a while, because she was resting quietly on the ground, having apparently exhausted all attempts to get the thing off. As I walked a little closer, my foot scritched on some gravel, and she suddenly jumped up and started… well, “looking around” isn’t quite accurate, is it? I had mercy and went straight to her and pulled it off.
Naturally, the moment it was off, the little devil who sits on my left shoulder started whispering in my ear; so rather than disposing of the box, I casually placed it back on the ground and walked away.
Twenty minutes later I came back. There was the dog, resting quietly with her head stuck shoulder-deep in a large Milkbone box.
I was kind this time and got rid of the box. We could have gone all day, probably.
Darleen asks an excellent question over on her blog. A simple “yes” or “no” should suffice.
But of course it doesn’t if you thought process is as nuanced twisted as that of the modern antiwar leftist.
Make sure to read all the comments, too.
A friend and New Orleans native writes me:
I found this great web site that is trying to save New Orleans from another hurricane. They are trying to collect 1 Million signatures so Congress will pass a bill to rebuild the levees stronger this time.
I just signed the pledge. Please sign now before you forget, go to http://www.savebigeasy.org
My reply follows:
Unfortunately none of that will do a damned bit of good until the massive corruption is cleaned out of the Louisiana political machine. That extra money will go straight into somebody’s pocket, just as it did last time….
You are aware, aren’t you, that the levees that failed were later found to have not been built to the specifications? In one case in particular, it was supposed to have been built with pylons going down 17 feet; the actual levee was built with pylons going down a mere 7 feet — less than half the required depth.
I read about that in one article, lost in the morass of screaming and finger pointing and “Bush didn’t do enough” bullshit. And I am terribly sad to say that I will not call for another dime of federal money for New Orleans until somebody at least tells me how we plan to identify and prosecute the people responsible for the corruption that specifically caused the levees to fail. Somewhere out there are individuals who pocketed the money slated for making those levees much stronger, and those people’s greed is directly responsible for the near total destruction of an American city. Worst, we’re pouring in more and more money, while doing nothing to prevent it from all happening again.
There are probably a good number of people who deserve to be in prison for this. For life.
… and nobody even seems to be looking for them.
I’m sorry, but I can’t help you.
Update: hotlinked the URL
Did a few rounds with the pellet gun in my friend’s basement yesterday. He’s been shooting for not terribly long, but the rest of us were rank amateurs.
Damn my eyes — my wife kicked my butt!
That is all.
(alternate title: “Big-bada-bunny!”)
Yes, that’s a real photo and not a Photoshop job.
Update: hat tip: Peeve Farm
There is an ongoing debate between two gun rights advocates, Kevin from The Smallest Minority and David from The War on Guns.
In essence, David is an “absolutist”, who insists that since the Constitution clearly states we have an unfettered right to keep and bear arms, any celebration of new laws that loosen previous restrictions by gun rights advocates is actually a further abdication of those rights because we are further acknowledging and in a sense endorsing the idea that the government has the authority to infringe those rights in the first place. At one point he likens gun licensing to paying the local thug for the right to drive your own car. In essence, he believes that to even join the discussion is to concede that the other side has a point; or to carry the analogy, to negotiate your driving with the thug is to agree he has the right to stop you from driving in the first place. (I hope that succinct description accurately describes his stance.)
Kevin, on the other hand, points to the progression of gun laws in the U.S. in the past 20 or so years. In a nutshell: “So… We should be unhappy that Nebraska just went from a ‘no concealed-carry anywhere’ law to a ‘concealed-carry most places’ law? This is a step backwards?”
The bulk of the original debate is here: http://waronguns.blogspot.com/… (and in comments) with more here: http://smallestminority.blogspot.com/….
In a very real sense this is one of those “in the real world” vs. “in theory” arguments.
Theory: The Constitution says we have unrestricted gun rights, and therefore we should all be able to carry a weapon anywhere we want without restriction.
Reality: The Constitution says we have unrestricted gun rights, but there are many cases wherein if we do carry a weapon they will come for us and lock us in a literal cage.
I agree with the theory. It follows the almost lost idea that our government is beholden to the people; sadly most people these days seem to believe that the government is properly the more powerful of the two. The primary point of the Second Amendment was to ensure that the people remain more powerful than the government, in reality, rather than just in theory. One of my favorite statements regarding those who advocate gun restrictions goes something like this: “Saying that the Second Amendment is there so we can go hunting is like saying that the First Amendment is there so we can write the Sports page.” The right to keep and bear arms was not enumerated frivolously.
The idea set down by our founding fathers are excellent, and the theory sound, but I live in reality — and so does Kevin. As one commenter in those discussions put it, “How do you eat an elephant? One bite at a time.”
I must digress here for a moment, and bring up a different blog discussion that took place a few years ago on Steven Den Beste’s site. In it, Den Beste (an atheist) discusses a different kind of “right” — as in “right and wrong” — and its link to religion…
Does an act have an inherent ethical value?
Is an act right because God says it is right, or does God say it is right because it is right? In other words, either (1) the act has no inherent ethical value, but is assigned a value of “right” or “wrong” solely based on an arbitrary edict from God, or (2) God recognizes the inherent value of the act and then passes this on to us as received wisdom.
Whichever of these a Christian (or any other believer in a religion based on deities) chooses leaves him in a bind. If “wrong” acts are not inherently wrong, but only wrong because of God’s arbitrary edicts, then the Christian must face the possibility that God could change His mind. God could appear tomorrow, ten miles high, astride Jerusalem and announce in a booming voice that henceforth only murderers and torturers would be permitted into heaven, that slavery was a good thing, that genocide was noble and that anyone who helped a neighbor in need would burn in Hell for all eternity.[…]
Most Christians reject this possibility prima facie. But that leaves them with the other alternative, which is that the ethical value of the act exists independently of God’s declaration of it. God is not the source of the ethical value of the act, but only a convenient conduit by which we learn of that ethical value.
I think this is a solid argument, but barring the likelyhood of God appearing “ten miles high, astride Jerusalem” anytime soon, the reasoning therein has a lot more practical application within the context of this gun rights argument.
In other words: When the founders of our country wrote the Bill of Rights, did the rights they enumerated become rights because they wrote it down there, or did they write it down in order to specify that this was a right we already had? Did they create the right or simply describe it?
Most of them would have said they were merely specifying rights that clearly existed within the bounds of the Constitution they had written. In other words, it (theoretically) wasn’t even necessary for the founding fathers to have written the Bill of Rights, because it really just specifies things that the core Constitution already contains. The Constitution was in part written as a listing of specific powers the government had, with the assumption that if the paper doesn’t say it, then the government can’t do it. Since it didn’t say government could restrict guns, then, well, of course the government can’t restrict guns.
It did not take them too long to realize that future leaders would try to overreach the government’s power, however; so they decided it would be a good idea to specifically state the rights (already held by the people) that were most important to the preservation of freedom.
So… the gun rights absolutists’ argument is essentially that if we accept that the government does have the right to restrict gun ownership, then we accept that — like Steven Den Beste’s hypothetical god — government could tomorrow decide to ban all guns and we have already accepted their authority to do so.
The majority of society already believes that government has that power, and since government gets its power from the people, the government in the long run gets its power from whatever most of the people believe. (If this were not true, cities across the country would not be able to ban smoking in all restaurants!) So while both the Absolutists and the Incrementalists have the same goal in mind, the absolutists are trying to win the war by fighting a battle that has already been lost. What they should be attempting is to retake lost ground in a new battle.
Thus, the pragmatists approach to regaining gun rights seems to me to be the most effective. You incrementally “rent” back the rights that have effectively already been lost, and when you have enough power on your side, only then do you… *ahem*… pull the trigger and attempt to reassert the absoluteness of those rights — perhaps through new legislation that clarifies the true meaning of the Second Amendment. (Perhaps such a law could, for example, clarify that the first clause of the Amendment is descriptive and not restrictive? I’m not a lawyer, but I’m sure we’ll think of something.)
As things stand now, trying to implement a federal policy stating that there are to be no restrictions on gun rights constitutes a sea change in public philosophy — though it is becoming less and less of one as time passes and more states ease restrictions, (as illustrated in the map at the bottom of this post).
We’re getting there… “one bite at a time.”
Update– Steven Den Beste writes via email:
Are you aware of the history of the Bill of Rights?
There were a number of questions where were quite contentious at the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia, as to whether they should have been included in the Constution proper when it was presented to the states for ratification.
There were concerns by some that the issues, if left out, would lead to government abuse. There were concerns by others that if too much was put into the Constitution there was a risk that it wouldn’t be ratified at all.
The compromise they came up with was based on the recognition that the country needed a charter. So those issues were left out, but everyone agreed that if the Constitution was ratified, that the first Congress would then propose those issues as amendments.
There were 12 of them. Ten were ratified immediately, and those ten are what we call the Bill of Rights. (The eleventh one was ratified about 25 years ago, interestingly. The twelfth one is dead and won’t ever be ratified because it would increase the size of the House of Representatives to something like 5000.)
So the historical record nicely straddles the question of whether those are natural rights **recognized** by the Bill of Rights or rights effectively **created** by the Bill of Rights.
As a practical matter, though, that’s a difference that makes no difference.
Duly noted. Sometimes my understanding of history is a bit more of a “broad sweep” than I realize, and such corrections are welcome.
As he also notes, in practical terms it makes little difference — unless of course the government passes a new Constitutional Amendment repealing the 2nd Amendment. They could do so if there were enough support; this is what Kevin refers to as “the mistake a free society only gets to make once.”
Former President “Jhimmi” Carter tells us why he’s a Democrat:
[A 16-year old girl] asked me about the differences between Democrats and Republicans.
I asked her, “Are you for peace, or do you want more war?” Then I asked her, “Do you favor government helping the rich, or should it seek to help the poorest members of society? Do you want to preserve the environment, or do you want to destroy it? Do you believe this nation should engage in torture, or should we condemn it? Do you think each child today should start life responsible for $28,000 in [federal government] debt, or do you think we should be fiscally responsible?”
I told her that if she answered all of those questions, that she believed in peace, aiding the poor and weak, saving the environment, opposing torture … then I told her, “You should be a Democrat.”
So… let’s recap, shall we?
| Democrats… | Republicans… |
|---|---|
| …are “for peace” | …”want more war” |
| …think government should “seek to help the poorest members of society” | …”favor government helping the rich” |
| …”want to preserve the environment” | …”want to destroy [the environment]” |
| …”condemn [torture]” | …”believe this nation should engage in torture” |
| …”think we should be fiscally responsible” | …”think each child today should start life responsible for $28,000 in [government] debt” |
Hey Jimmy — you forgot “Republicans want to throw old people out into the street,” and my personal favorite: “Republicans want to starve schoolchildren.”
Let’s let Jimmy’s list simmer for a while. I’ll have comments later.
Update: modified the table to better reflect Carter’s actual wording
The even-handed minds at Dateline NBC are going redneck fishing by sending guys with proverbial “Hi, I’m a Muslim” signs to Nascar races. Instapundit has some interesting commentary.
In other news, CBS News has decided they can best heal the ratings damage done by Dan Rather’s blatant political bias by hiring on Katy “hopefully Saddam escapes” Couric as their new Nightly News anchor.
(And now that I’ve linked to Glenn Reynolds, he can sit right back and bask in the glow of his first “Striderlanche” — which in his case would involve his hits dropping precipitously for about five minutes.)
Hat Tip: Smallest Minority
Gahrie asks:
Does anybody else think [Georgia Representative Cynthia McKinney] blew up this incident with the security guard on purpose because she knew the story about her spending money flying Isaac hayes [sic] out to her district was about to break?
Or am I giving her too much credit for being able to do something like that deliberately?
If it is all a scheme — thought I doubt it — it’s a really bad one. If this thing drags out much longer, McKinney may finally do to the race baiters (or “misery merchants”, as Tammy Bruce calls them) what Bill Clinton did to the Democratic party.
Unfortunately, (fortunately for the Jesses Jackson of the world), she’s not prominent enough to do as much damage to here “peeps” as Clinton did to his.
—
In related news, it appears Neil Boortz has been reading Pandagon
