Country music is a state of mind, that leaps national boundaries. It's no surprise to find a thriving Country music scene in Canada. You might be surprised to find a Country music scene in francophone (french speaking) Canada.
Devost is un vrai chanteur country (a real Country singer), as the say up in Québec. The words may be unfamiliar, but the style is unmistakeable. It's about being far from home and family, and working for a living. It's not, in fact, and American style, it's a country style.
Salut trucker écoute mes chansons
Apporte ma musique dans ton beau camion
Salut trucker t'auras un compagnon
Sur la route si loin de ta maison
Salut trucker écoute mes chansons
Apporte ma musique dans ton beau camion
Salut trucker t'auras un compagnon
Sur la route si loin de ta maison
Avec ta cargaison tu parcoures tout le pays
Roule au Canada comme aux États-Unis
Du bords de l'Atlantique au Pacifique
De l'Alaska jusqu'aux frontières du Mexique
Salut trucker écoute mes chansons
Apporte ma musique dans ton beau camion
Salut trucker t'auras un compagnon
Sur la route si loin de ta maison
Pense à ta famille à ta femme et tes enfants
Tu t'ennuies de tes parents que tu vois pas assez souvent
Écoute ma musique tu sais je te comprends
Toi et moi on est des cowboys de note temps
Salut trucker écoute mes chansons
Apporte ma musique dans ton beau camion
Salut trucker t'auras un compagnon
Sur la route si loin de ta maison
Sur la route si loin de ta maison
If anyone can challenge Robert Johnson for the title "King of the Delta Blues", it's John Lee Hooker who exploded onto the Blues scene in 1948 with this.
"No drama Obama" was supposed to be the cool, intellectual, rational choice for President in 2008. He even kept an even keep when questioned by Joe the Plumber, although he didn't answer very well.
That whole image is fraying now, and fraying badly. It seems that pretty much everyone is posting about his "Call my bluff" statement. Gotcher drama right here, bub.
So the interesting question is when will the frayed threads snap? Obama hasn't had to deal with any sort of real crisis during his entire career, and it's apparent that he's thrashing about like a drowning man. For someone with as inflated an ego as he has, this has to be an incredible source of frustration. And an unfamiliar one.
So when does he snap, and just plain lose it in front of a camera? More importantly, what should people be doing to hasten the snap?
This is a long presentation, but one of the best I've ever seen. It nails the real problem with Facebook, and gives a hint about what Google+ might be.
Via Isegoria, we don't often see something that so brilliantly cuts to the heart of a problem:
A few years ago, before the CEO cared a whit about social networking or identity, a Google User Experience researcher named Paul Adams created a slide deck called the Real Life Social Network. In a very long and well-illustrated talk, he makes the point that there is an impedence mismatch between what you share on facebook and your interactions in real life. So when you share a photo of yourself doing something crazy at a party, you don’t intend for your aunt and uncle, workmates or casual acquaintances to see it. But facebook does not do a good job of making this separation. This, in essence, is what the slide deck says and his point is made with great amounts of detail and insight.
So when Google began its social effort in earnest, the powers-that-be seized upon Paul’s research and came up with the Circles product. This was to be the core differentiator between Google+ (then codenamed Emerald Sea) and facebook.
Whether Google+ will actually do this well, or whether it will succeed in the marketplace, remains to be seen.
Part of the Stimulus was spent to increase access to broadband in rural areas. A study has analyzed the cost per household served, and it's staggering:
Eisenach and Caves looked at three areas that received stimulus funds, in the form of loans and direct grants, to expand broadband access in Southwestern Montana, Northwestern Kansas, and Northeastern Minnesota. The median household income in these areas is between $40,100 and $50,900. The median home prices are between $94,400 and $189,000.
So how much did it cost per unserved household to get them broadband access? A whopping $349,234, or many multiples of household income, and significantly more than the cost of a home itself.
Except it's worse. It seems that Montana has 7 service providers. In the whole state, it appears that only seven households had no access to any of them. If you divide the Stimulus funding by those households, you could have bought each of those families a condo with a nice Central Park view. Maybe two.
Admittedly, it wasn't just 7 families that benefited. There was a whole set of broadband providers that lobbied the government for free cash. Millions went to rolling out a service that may or may not be actually being used by formerly unserved households. But the investment in lobbyist budget clearly seems to have paid off handsomely.
Back at the startup companies I've worked at, a common theme was "spend money like it was your own". Prioritization counted, because otherwise the company might not make it. The Fed.Gov is completely incapable of this sort of prioritization, which is the best argument against the expansion of the Fed.Gov.
... makes me depressed. The current debt ceiling negotiations are a clown car act:
Why can't they take the deal?
There's one semi-fair reason, which is that the Democrats and the GOP leadership got entirely too cute with the last round of negotiations, finding a bunch of fake "cuts"--and then bragging that they hadn't really cut anything. Their fans in the commentariat joined in the gloating. So this time, the serious cutters aren't going to settle for anything except massive cuts, right now--they don't trust the other parties in the deal to carry through on anything less draconians. Nice job guys.
The government spent everything they could squeeze from us when the economy was good. Then, when the economy went bad, instead of cutting back like all of us had to, they convinced a bunch of people that the way to make the economy better was to spend MORE.
Look, I put on my Big Boy britches this morning. I know that actually courageous politicians are scarce as hen's teeth. But we've already been through the budget cut kabuki - Obama's own Deficit Reduction Commission has a plan that, while not ideal, is plausible.
Obama won't touch it. Instead, he's saying they'll cut off Grandma's Social Security check.
Here's the calculus: you can't fix the budget without addressing entitlements. You can't fix the budget without raising some taxes. And you can't fix the budget without reducing Government headcount, because guys like me won't believe they're serious without it, and will be incandescent with rage that "shared sacrifice" doesn't include Governmental Regulators.
Full stop.
But here's the calculation that depresses me: our miserable Political Class doesn't see political gain in that calculus, and so they're playing Chicken with the Train.
I look at #1 Son and wonder if he'll be able to get a job when he gets out of college. Heck, will I have a job when he gets out of college? Default is one huge rotating fan, and there's one big old pile of something that will hit it, if it gets to that point. And both parties are driving us down that road - I've never seen such an abdication of Presidential leadership as we're seeing here. And I've never seen a Republican Party that is willing to sell the country out for short term political gain.
Quite frankly, Paul Ryan looks to be about the only Grown Up in Washington, D. C. At the risk of repeating myself, let me repeat myself:
All of them. I get comments when I post this, with people pointing out the evils of the Democrats. Fair enough. But what this Republic is desperate for is leadership and political courage, and we're sure not seeing it from the GOP. So fire them, too. Eventually, we - like Abraham Lincoln - will find a General that will actually fight for us.
Until then, they'll all just keep playing chicken with the train.
... that the problem is not the Democrats, and the solution is not the Republicans. The problem is a permanent Governing Class that has increasing contempt for you and me, and a sense of entitlement to exceptions to the rules that apply to us unwashed masses.
Klein, a freshman lawmaker, said she has heard and read comments from people who don't understand why she feels the need to constantly walk around armed, even on the secured floor of the legislative chamber.
"They kind of look like everybody who does carry is some kind of hick or hillbilly or cowboy type," Klein said, "and they don't identify."
No, I understand why you'd want to pack heat. Even on the floor of the legislature, which quite frankly would be an admirable political statement in support of liberty.
What we object to, Cupcake, is brandishing and muzzle sweeping (if you can even call it that - it looks like you deliberately aimed your gun at something that didn't need any holes installed in it). And we object to the fact that you're free as a bird while I would be looking at the inside of a jail cell and loss of my carry permit had I played that particular game.
What I object to is the sense of entitlement of a Political Class that thinks it's just like me, only better. Voters of Arizona, here's some advice that applies to Sen. Kline next election day:
You know what to do.
In all fairness, her side of the story is somewhat different than the reporter's. But she's dumb as a box of hammers if she thought that showing her gat to a reporter would get her good press.
It's said that Journalism is the "first draft of history", which makes the bias of the news media a big concern. The best demonstration of bias isn't what's written, but what isn't written - subjects deemed unworthy of examination tend to fall on one side of the ideological mid-line.
Historians write the second draft of history, as it were. With the far leftwards slant of Universities in general and Liberal Arts in particular, it's no surprise to find precisely this same sort of problem. Foseti observes it in action, in a history of the War Between the States:
Goldfield, our author, suggests that the Civil War was caused by religious zealotry in the North. The religious zealots could not stand slavery. Their religiousness made them willing to go to great lengths to perfect their society – this meant ending slavery by force, if necessary.
I’ve covered this before – abolitionism is obviously the cause of the war though it’s currently fashionable to blame “slavery” while ignoring the fact that every other slave-holding country ended slavery without resorting to the mass slaughter of its own citizenry and that slavery had existed in the US for a very long time without requiring mass slaughter.
One point for Goldfield for correctly understanding the causes of the war.
Goldfield’s story gets absurd when he discusses the end of the war. He believes that after 4 years of war that killed the modern equivalent of 10 million people, Northerners gave up their religious extremism, went home, and started the industrial revolution.
...
Instead, what happened was that the Northerners continued to try to perfect the conquered South. The results were devastating and continued for years. Read the intro to this book for the best short description that I’ve found. Only after many more years of failure and destruction – and how could they not fail at making model citizens out of people who were just removed from slavery? – did the Northerners give up. Ignoring the tragedy of reconstruction is fashionable, but inexcusable.
Good luck finding this discussed in the classroom, though. A history of the Progressives' many and bloody failures would be interesting indeed. But it's what isn't published that tells the tale.
Tam posted a bit ago about not feeling it. I confess to some of that, as well. For me, that's a bit strange.
After all, I've only been blogging three years (today my odometer will click over a half million visits, which is very nice indeed but strangely isn't inducing the Happy Dance I had imagined a year ago).
Some of it is feeling repetitive. I've been sitting on a few Climate Change posts, not because they might not be timely, but because I've kind of said everything that I have to say on the matter. Yeah, the databases are way screwed up, so we really don't know if we're warming or not. Not sure I need to say it again.
Same thing with security. It's screwed up, and the folks who should be leading the way for the rest of us seem as screwed up as anyone. Seems like I've said it before.
And so increasingly I've been relying on snarkiness, or rants, or a quick funny cartoon or video. Feh.
Not sure what to do about this. It seems like this blog is too young to suffer blogger burnout.
You have to watch to the end to see shooting through a car door, but it's worth it. It's also something to watch a filled water barrel jump when hit by a 7.62x39 round. And get absolutely destroyed by a single .50 BMG round.
I don't really get Airsoft. I say this as someone who's dropped hundreds of dollars into Airsoft guns. The kids like them, at least for a while. I tried it - even setting up an Airsoft range in my basement back at Chez Borepatch - but it didn't take. An Airsoft 1911 simply doesn't fire like a .45 ACP 1911, and so it didn't take long before I lost interest.
Some folks are not so lucky as to live in Georgia or Texas, and so Airsoft lets them scratch an itch that I now can address in a louder way. I do understand this, having once been a Prisoner Of Mother Massachusetts (POMM).
I can even understand re-enactments, and can appreciate the effort and time that goes into insanely great ones.
Pimpin' your Airsoft with gold spray paint. I confess that I don't get this. Or this:
Looks hard to draw, at least to me.
But the owner of the web site looks like he's a Prisoner Of Mother England (POME, not POMM), and so this is likely the only way he can scratch his itch. And so let me extend the hand of friendship across the Pond: if Arnie is ever visiting Georgia or Texas, send me an email. I'd be delighted to take you to the range.
Police say London Eley, his ex-girlfriend and the mother of his 1-year-old daughter, allegedly solicited to have him murdered.
According to authorities, Eley posted this message on her Facebook wall: "I will pay somebody a stack to kill my baby father."
Investigators say Timothy Bynum took up the offer.
...
In fact, Bynum allegedly responded to Eley on Facebook: "say no more," "what he look like?" "where he be at," "need dat stack 1st," and "ima mop that bull."
I'd think that the Google+ "circles" would make criminal investigations easier, especially if someone named one of them "ima mop that bull".
It took him almost three months, and it was a communal effort of sorts, with fifteen people involved. So perhaps he has a life after all. In any case, it was magnificent.
I moved away from the iPhone because the insane DRM became intrusive, and actually stopped me from blogging with the Blogpress app. I annoyed me that I moved to Android on my shiny new Samsung Galaxy Android phone, using the Blogaway app.
Mistake.
It's simply not ready for blogging, and an abortive post last night illustrates why: not only was it filled with embarrassing misspellings, but the Blogaway ate half of the post, so that what was left was incoherent. It's plenty easy enough for me to do incoherent all by myself; I don't need any help from the phone, thanks very much.
This experience no doubt was exacerbated by the fact that I was posting near the end of a 14+ hour drive from Austin to Atlanta, and was pretty tired out. But this is actually worse for Android - rather than being an excuse for its crappy performance, this is the test case for use. If someone can use the system tired, it's ready for Prime Time. If they can't, then the crummy system will perform precisely how it did last night, and the user's confidence in the system as a robust blogging platform will plummet.
Here are the shortcomings that kill Android as a mobile blogging platform:
1. The soft keyboard
It blows chunks. This isn't really surprising, because all soft keyboards blow chunks. The keys are of necessity too small (we're talking about a 4 or 5 inch screen, of course they're too small), and all the tactile feedback mechanisms are wrong, because they don't address the killer problem soft keyboards have:
You hit the key next to the one that you want to, all the time.
The iPhone actually has a mechanism to deal with this. While it's not exactly a real-time spell checker, it's close enough that we can pretend it is. While this autocomplete can have sometimes hilarious or unfortunate unintended results, mostly it works pretty well. To solve the "I hit the key next to the one I wanted because the keys are too damn small" problem, it's very close to an ideal solution.
Android doesn't have anything here. Nothing that compares to the iPhone, nothing like a spell checker that highlights misspelled words. Nothing. The user is left to manually spell check his text, and manually edit it to fix it. Which leads us to the next killer problem:
2. Text Editing
It blows chunks. And quite frankly, there's no excuse for this, because the iPhone has decent enough text editing. Everything has decent enough text editing, and has ever since vi replaced Teco as the editor of choice for power geeks everywhere.
It seems that Google hired the Teco engineering team to write the text editing routines. Note to Google: this isn't a compliment.
And you have to edit all the damn time, because the soft keyboard blows chunks and Android leaves that as a problem for the user to fix. Go ahead - try to make the cursor hop around to random spots in your text (exactly as you would when spell checking a blog post). Which leads us to the final killer problem that makes Android a trifecta of fail:
3. Random commands that unexpectedly do things are bad, mkay?
Blogaway somehow managed to eat half of my post, while I was trying to edit the text to fix the misspellings. I'm not quite sure how it did this, but this is my point - if the menu options aren't clear about what they're going to do, then the user is going to be surprised. It's hard to see how any of the surprises will be pleasant ones.
One of the jokes people used to make about the Teco editor was that you could enter any command into it at all, and it would do something. You could escape to command mode, type your name, and it would do something. Power geeks used to compete for extra crazy 1337 cred by predicting what that would be in advance.
Note to Google and Blogaway: that isn't a compliment.
And so the trifecta: a horrible keyboard guaranteeing many "off by one" misspellings, lousy text editing capabilities, and an arcane and "exciting" menu system that can do all sorts of unexpected transforms on your post.
Fail.
The Android architecture may be better (I have no real opinion here), the Open Source aspect is attractive, but overall nobody's running the shop on how tired users will actually use the system. And so Android takes the blame. It's not ready. The phone is OK, the email is acceptable* but the apps mostly stink and are only usable as toys. Google needs to put some serious effort into the user experience. They can start by firing the Teco team.
* But I see emails saying "I apologize for any misspellings, as this is sent from my Android phone" which translates to "My crappy phone can't spellcheck to save its life and has a keyboard that blows chunks, but IT makes me use it. Please don't think that I'm an idiot."
Death Valley, California saw the highest temperature ever recorded in the United States - 134° F. In 1913.
Let me put that in perspective: after what we're told has been a century of Global Warming, the highest recorded temperature in this land occurred before the Titanic took her sea trials. That's a century of righteous Global Warming, right there. Pretty neat how it's raising the average temperatures but not the record temperatures.
In other examples of governmental screw-ups, on this day in 1832 President Andy Jackson vetoed the bill re-chartering the Second Bank of America. Obviously, the bill's supporters hadn't explained the virtues of Quantitative Easing to him ...
And in other news of governmental screw-ups, this day in 1940 saw the establishment of the French government in Vichy. To make up for that, the French Secret Service blows up the Greenpeace vessel Rainbow Warrior in New Zealand on this day in 1985. 'nuff said.
King Olav V of Norway was famously athletic,winning a gold medal (in sailing) in the 1928 Summer Olympic Games. He was also an accomplished skier, jumping from the Holmenkillbakken ski jump. He is also perhaps the most popular monarch of my lifetime, no doubt in no small measure due to this sort of thing:
He was photographed trying to pay for his own ticket on the train. He was on the train because it was the 1973 energy crisis (this was before the North Sea oil discoveries) and while he could have had a royal allotment of petrol, he took the same transport that his subjects had to. He also famously refused to drive in the "public transport" highway lanes, even though as sovereign he was entitled to. He took no bodyguards when he went skiing - only his dog - and when asked why not, he replied that the entire country had his back.
Deservedly so - they recognized on of their own. Would that our own governing elite take his example to heart.
What does it take to rescue you from Strauss and Wagner? If you're Gustav Holst, it's Ralph (pronounced "Raiff") Vaughn Williams and his English Country tunes, Walt Whitman, and Indian Vedic Philosophy.
And as some of you expect, Holst is at the absolute top of the list of "Classical Composers I'd like to buy a pint" ...
Because despite his German name, Holst was English to the core. Born in Cheltenham, I missed his birthplace when I was visiting GCHQ (the UK's NSA). I also missed his ashes, which are buried in Chichester Cathedral - my second favorite English Cathedral (after Winchester). Obviously, I grievously neglected my Holst Appreciation during our sojourn in Her Britannic Magesty's Scepter'd Isle.
The Planets was Holst's greatest work, and Mars was perhaps the most recognizable part of that suite. It's perennially green, as generation after generation find that it accompanies and inspires new sources of wonder.
As it does today, and we see that while one door closes, and another opens. The venerable Space Shuttle (which took its maiden flight when I was in College) is now performing its last orbits. Some people are waxing sentimental on this end, perhaps despite themselves:
I know what a bureaucratically-crippled, politically-logrolled white elephant the whole Shuttle program was from the start...
...but I'll get a little choked up all the same.
If you're going to steal money from me at gunpoint, promise me you'll use it to do cool stuff like shake the ground with thunder and punch holes through the sky.
Nobody does inspirational like NASA, and while the manned space program has given us heros, the most inspirational bit of what they've done is visiting other planets. When you think of that, you (deservedly) think "USA" and "NASA". And nothing says "visiting another planet" like the Mars Rover Spirit, which outlived its designed mission limit by six years.
Spirit finally got stuck in soft sand and no longer responds to commands from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory. But one door closes, but another remains open: Opportunity continues its exploration of another damn planet. Bravo.
Holst died in 1934, when cutting edge space exploration was being done by Robert Goddard. However, I like to think that he'd like this video of the mission to Mars, Bringer Of War. I'd sure like to chat with him over a pint about this.
Acting ATF Director Kenneth Melson, in closed-door testimony in front of Rep. Darrell Issa's committee, said administration officials sought to control and limit his communications with Congress, including withholding documents that made Melson "sick to his stomach" after he reviewed them.
On Dec. 14, Terry was fatally shot in the Arizona desert while patrolling one of the region's most dangerous drug- and human-smuggling corridors. He was shot in the back with an AK-47 assault rifle. Two weapons that were allowed to cross the border as part of Project Gunrunner were found at the scene.
The evidence suggests that Agent Terry's death was financed by the president's stimulus package with the full knowledge and support of Attorney General Holder.
Offered for your consideration, a theme song for Obama's ATF:
He's ordering tacos! And then it gets really scary:
This is exactly what the Brady crowd said would happen. Oh, the humanity!
But seriously, the Austin bats are very cool. And the little suckers are small and keep dodging, so .45 ACP is the wrong caliber. You'd want pretty light bird shot ...
This weekend I head back to Atlanta, and Camp-Borepatch-on-the-Chattahoochee. I've been away for quite a while, and while #2 Son came to visit me here in Texas at Forward Operating Base Borepatch, we like the other, lesser 49 states, too.
But I've already done Georgia On My Mind here at Saturday Redneck. So sing it, Junior:
All the stations up here don't sign off with Dixie,
The way they did in sweet home Alabama,
The people here don't sip Jack Daniels whiskey,
The way they do in that Tennessee mountain land.
I've always heard lots about the big apple,
So I thought I'd come up here and see,
But all I've seen so far is one big hassle,
Wish I was camped out on the Okachovee.
If this is the promised land,
I've had all I can stand,
And I'm headed back below that Dixie line
Well I just don't fit in,
And I'll never come back again,
I'm busted here with Dixie on my mind,
Oh, I'm stuck up here and I got Dixie on my mind.
These people never smile or say a word,
They're all too busy tryin' to make an extra dime,
Oh I'd love to haul 'em all down around Spartanburg,
And show 'em how to raise hell in Carolina.
Oh, the things you know that I miss most of all,
Is the freedom of the rivers and the pines,
They don't do much huntin' and fishin' up here ya know,
But I have met a few squirrels and one porcupine.
If this is the promised land,
I've had all I can stand,
Wish I was down in Houston town tonight,
Well I just don't fit in,
And I'll never come back again,
I'm busted here with Dixie on my mind,
Oh, I'm stuck up here and I got Dixie on my mind.
Mr. Leal's shout of "Viva Mexico!" on the commencement of his quick, state-funded trip to Hell, indicates a pressing problem with Mexican immigration generally. Many Mexican immigrants, legal and illegal, feel little or no loyalty to America.
It's true that this is a nation of immigrants. It's also true (although you won't read this in the WaPo) that this is a nation formed of assimilated immigrants.
I'm willing to be persuaded that large numbers of unassimilated immigrants aren't a problem, but I haven't seen any good data on it. Quite frankly, it looks like nobody who could do this research wants to do it, which makes me suspicious.
I took my 1911 with me twice yesterday. Somehow, I managed to resist the orbiting NRA Mind Control Ray. Here is a more or less stream of consciousness set of impressions.
1. The holster (Dragon Leather Works Quantum) is really, really good. Specifically, it's rock solid, and holds the pistol absolutely immobile. Sitting down, standing up, leaning on the railing of the Congress Street Bridge (to see the bats, natch) - the pistol didn't change its position at all. This is in great contrast to the first time I CCW'ed - my crummy holster that time ended up slipping down inside my britches, so I was always worrying about it.
I was also always messing with it, and as Tam likes to say, stop messing with your gat. This holster meant I didn't want to. More on the holster itself in a later post, but if you're new to carrying, run don't walk and get a good, stiff holster with strong belt clips. Srlsy.
2. I changed a couple times before I left Forward Operating Base Borepatch. Some of my favorite Hawaiian shirts print pretty badly when I bend over - the shirt catches a bit on the grip and it becomes obvious that I'm carrying. Heavier fabrics seem to work better - either they resist getting snagged, or the fabric is heavy enough to drop off the grip.
3. I didn't have a round in the chamber. I was a bit nervous, it being really the first real time and all. Obviously, you carry a pistol for the unexpected, and so this was way suboptimal. Once I'm more used to this, I expect that cocked and locked will be the norm.
4. The laws in Texas are seemingly subtly different from those in Georgia. My guess is that the first rule is "Don't cause a problem for someone else", but I actually asked a couple guys in the office what I should know. The two answers were "don't drink if you go into a bar" and "Don't go places where there are the '30-06' signs posted" (this is the state law that lets private businesses ban firearms). This bit was where the solidity of the Quantum holster came in handy - since I wasn't worried about the piece itself shifting, I could devote all my attention to keeping myself as much out of legal trouble as possible.
5. It seems that "Common Sense Gun Control" consists of a lot of strange and unexpected additional prohibitions that most people are unlikely to know, especially if you are - like me - from out of state on a reciprocal permit. Probably I'm being nasty and suspicious here.
More impressions later, but today was a thousand times better than the first.
Over there - at the Western Wear store! I'd say that nothing happened, but that's not true: I bought a cowboy hat for #2 Son and a "You all can go to Hell; I'm going to Texas" T-Shirt for me.
See, that's exactly the sort of thing they Brady crowd said would happen. The horror! Still, the carnage could have been worse:
It's designed to be reversible, inside the belt or outside the belt. I told Dennis that I was a complete n00b, and that the feedback he'd get from me would be from a n00b's perspective. I haven't taken this anywhere, but here are some initial impressions:
1. This holster holds my Citadel 1911 very snugly. Lots of folks have posted about how you need stiff leather for a good holster to hold the pistol snugly - the leather is certainly stiff, although as I said this is a n00b's perspective. It's certainly better than the last holster I used, which blew chunks.
The pistol is certainly held securely. I'd have to stand on my head for it to fall out. Using a three-point stance (to be able to keep it from sliding, I got pretty close. The 1911 didn't move.
But now that I've done that test once, I don't feel the need to repeat it. Even unloaded, it seemed on the edge of "fooling around with guns", which is double-plus ungood and makes me nervous.
2. While snug, the 1911 comes out of the holster smoothly when I draw it.
3. It feels secure - the trigger is covered by the leather, and you'd have to really fool around with it (this is double-plus ungood, remember?) to cause trouble for yourself.
4. It's pretty, in its outwards facing ("Barbecue holster") configuration. It's a minute's work with a flat head screwdriver to unscrew the fasteners to reverse the belt hooks for concealed carry.
5. I expect it's been 40 years since I wore a holster. It's surprisingly comfortable, even sitting down. Might be a different story with a full sized 1911.
6. I haven't tried concealed carry yet. I'll post about that later.
It's a strange feeling walking around with a pistol on my hip, even if it's just inside Forward Operating Base Borepatch. I'll have to reverse the belt clips and try concealed carry next.
7. Oh, yeah, it has a nifty logo, created by some d00d on teh Intarwebz:
The New York Times published dozens and dozens of breathless stories about how CIA operative Valerie Plame was "outed" during the Bush (Jr.) administration. Story after hyperventilating story about a rogue, out of control political hijacking of the government agencies, with payback for the poor, professional workers who bravely resist the Dark Powers.
Or something.
Strange how, when nobody died during that episode, and the only person convicted (Scooter Libby) wasn't the one who outed Plame, the narrative still deserved front page, above the fold, shrieking headlines.
Funny, it seems to be entirely different. [rolls eyes]
Seriously, will the last person laid off by the last media organization please turn off the lights? Dumb as a bag of hammers, right there. And a helpful note to Progressives: the best evidence of media bias isn't what's published - it's what isn't published. And the best evidence that you're not very smart is that you need to learn this from me. Love, Borepatch.
Dennis from Dragon Leather Works has an interesting idea - what if you could have a holster that would work rigged inside your belt (for those times when you want to be all covert) as well as outside your belt (say, for when you're at a Texas Barbecue)? Obviously, the Barbecue bit means that you're showing off the pretty thing.
So he made one thats pretty:
And he sent one to me to try out. It's said to be here now, so you'll hear about it in a while - I'm quite excited to have a holster that won't suck.
Dennis calls it the "Quantum" - you can't know where it will be. Hmmm, said I: that sort of insanely fun geekiness calls for some retro PhotoshopThe Gimp love:
That's the simple one. But you know me - why stop at simple when you can get all complex:
After all, it's for a Barbecue, right? People will know it's time to stop hitting the Shiner Bock when they can't figure it out. And so, how about a poll?
Just a clarification: by "I'll pay" I actually mean "You'll pay". ;-)
Blogging is likely to be light, as I enjoy some family time here at Forward Operating Base Borepatch. Now if you'll excuse me, I have a bathroom to clean ...
This 4th of July weekend was spent flying from Austin to Maine, for Dad's Memorial Service. Extra props to Mother Nature for a spectacular thunderstorm that closed Detroit Airport and got my flight to Bangor canceled.
Double extra crazy props to Delta Airlines for getting me to the service in time, anyway.
And yesterday was flying back, BAN-DET-ATL-AUS. Uff da.
I'm glad I went, though. Mom hadn't gotten her hearing aid for Dad's funeral, and so she got to hear my eulogy. And I got to hear Dad's Maine friends tell stories on my pa. And it's not a trip to Orono without Pat's Pizza.
But I'm really glad for the time I spent with Mom. She and Dad had one of those "lightning in a bottle" relationships: madly in love, but friends. Lifelong companions. That's extra hard when one of them goes. She and I had one of the best talks we've ever had, in no small part from the wisdom that you have left here in the comments. Thanks.
But I'm tired now - more so than your typical long weekend. Posting will continue later. But for now*, it's time to spin down.
* I schedule posts the night before. You're living in my future, as it were.
My flight to Detroit just touched down. The flight attendants came on the PA asking everyone to remain seated when we reach the gate, so some soldiers returning back to Afghanistan.
Everyone clapped. Everyone.
Then the Captain came on. He said we were taking a fallen soldier home. You could have heard a pin drop.
God Speed, whoever you are. I can't imagine any thanks can possibly fill the void your family feels.
We're at the gate, and the plane is clapping for the soldiers again. Out the window, you can see the cars lined up on the tarmac for our fallen hero. Everyone' crowded around the windows.
It feels like you're in church - that you're in the presence of something holy.
There was a boy no older than ten a couple rows in front of me. When he saw this, he took off his baseball cap:
Photo credit: Borepatch
All weekend long I had the song running through my head that I posted on Tuesday:
This must be a tough duty, spending all day, every day welcoming home fallen veterans. It must take a special sort of personality to be continually surrounded by grieving families, and to take that grief as an inspiration to perfect the ceremony. The respect they showed - especially to Mom - was very moving.
It's strange, but after months leading up to Dad's death, and three weeks now to process the emotions, that I wasn't ready for the emotions that washed over me when the guard slow-saluted Mom, and then knelt down to present her the flag.
This flag is presented on behalf of a grateful nation and the United States Army as a token of appreciation for your loved one's honorable and faithful service.
The Honor Guard has a hard duty, and one that may seem unimportant. After all, it's just one more old man leaving his grieving family behind. The kindness and respect they devoted speaks volumes of them, and the Republic.
This is the final test of a gentleman: his respect for those who can be of no possible service to him.
- William Lyon Phelps
Last weekend wasn't an old man coming home to lie with his brothers, it was someone in the flush of youth. Someone who didn't get the chance to bury his father; on the contrary, someone whose father met him on the tarmac on his last flight.
I look on this Republic, and wonder how it can possibly live up to that sacrifice. And then I look at that ten year old boy on the plane, just some random kid on a vacation flight, taking his cap off as a sign of respect, and thanks. And I look at all the other passengers who would normally be crowding the aisle to get off the flying bus that brought them where they ended up. All crowded around the windows. I don't expect that many will ever forget that moment.
I sure won't.
Feels kinda like Church in here tonight. Thanks to Libertyman for pointing out this song. I posted it once, but this time it was up close and personal.
Et lux perpetua luceat eis.
Sir, whoever you are, I'm honored to have been flying with a hero that night.
1. Lefties learn from graybeard 60's radicals (now tenured professors) about how much fun it was to mock The Man, back in the day. About how the man was reduced to spittle-flecked rage or depression by said mockery.
Samson's strength, of course was in his hair. Pretty clearly, there's not much of a resemblance here.
But that leaves the question, where is the source of our strength? It's different for everyone, but if you cut it off, it's bad news.
For me, it's my family. It's quite strange being nearly a thousand miles away. In a sense, it's a haircut of a most uncomfortable kind. They say that knowledge is power, but I could have gone the rest of my life without learning this. Really.
You might have noticed that things are a little slow here (or maybe you've been too busy having fun with family and friends this Fourth of July weekend to keep hitting "refresh" here). I was traveling all day yesterday, back to Maine for Dad's Memorial Service.
Charles Ives may be the first American classical composer recognized as great by Europeans. His music was unique, combining traditional American popular and church themes with 20th Century European "Art" music.
It's a lot better than I just made it sound.
Ives is interesting, because he is in some ways a throwback to the great experimentalists and improvisers of the Classical period, like Mozart. He would take a theme and embellish and rework it into something that transcends the original material. Ives could be described as playful, changing rhythms, keys, and introducing ragtime-inspired techniques like tone clusters.
It makes for some mighty interesting listening, from a real American original.
My flight to Detroit just touched down. The flight attendant came on the PA asking everyone to remain seated when we reach the gate, so some soldiers returning back to Afghanistan.
Everyone clapped. Everyone.
Then the Captain came on. He said we were taking a fallen soldier home. You could have heard.a pin drop.
God Speed, whoever you are. I can't imagine any thanks can possibly fill the void your family feels.
We're at the gate, and the plane is clapping for the soldiers again. Out the window, you can see the cars lined up on the tarmac for our fallen hero. Everyone' crowded around the windows.
It feels like you're in church - that you're in the presence of something holy.
But as one who can enjoy only the distorted view of a victim is obliged to report, once the calamity of Pearl Harbor had registered, Washington most resembled that crisis in the old Keystone comedies when the resting firemen, grown amiable on undisturbed sessions of beer and games of pinochle, are electrified by the alarm and, diving headlong down the greasy pole, start to clomp importantly in every part of town ...
In 1917, the city had 38,000 government workers. In February 1942, it had close to a quarter million. And in spite of the pawky fun that has been made of this bureaucracy, it was the Secretariat of America's war and might be led or disciplined but could not be dissolved.
I grew up in a very liberal, Democratic family. A very liberal, Democratic, and unashamedly patriotic family. We saw this flag - the very one that flew over Ft. McHenry and was the inspiration for Frances Scott Key - in the Smithsonian Institution in 1974. It was thrilling.
Nowadays, it seems that the Fourth of July is a "Conservative Celebration", or some such nonsense. Strange.
Some might say that the National Anthem isn't a country music song at all, and they may be right. Nevertheless, it's played every day on every Country radio station, which means that just about every Country artist has recorded it.
Lady Antebellum is one of the new Nashville groups that you either love or hate, which will have to be a post for another day. But their rendition of the song is almost a hymn, and gave me goosebumps when I heard it. I would have had the same goosebumps back in 1974, if I had heard it then.
Is by Brigid, but it's over at Confederate Yankee. I won't excerpt a word. I will say that when I read her work, I feel the Devil breathing on my neck. Envy, after all, is one of the Seven Deadly Sins. Man, she sure can write. I know that reading her has made me a much better writer.
It's said that an Optimist believes that we live in the best of all possible worlds, but that a pessimist fears that this is indeed so. Foseti brings the pessimism:
Solutions from the few people that are trying to address the problem of unaccountable regulatory agencies fall into two categories.
1) Kling suggests "radical Federalism or competitive government." The good news is that this proposal would actually solve the problem. The bad news is that it’s impossible. The problem that we’re trying to solve is that unaccountable regulatory agencies have taken control of the government of the US. Achieving Kling’s proposal would require these disparate agencies to band together to radically reduce or destroy their own power and existence. Nothing could be more unlikely (they’ll never band together, for one).
2) Yandle’s solution, which is basically for Congress to reassert its own power over these executive agencies, suffers from the inverse of the problem with Kling’s solution. It is theoretically possible for Congress to reassert control over the legislative function, however the result would not be better government. You may not like unaccountable regulators making decisions, but you really wouldn’t like Congress making decisions.
There's an awful lot of smart packed into that post. And Isegoria shatters my faith in the one part of the Fed.Gov that actually seemed to work (for some value of the term "work"), the military:
William S. Lind discusses the inevitable corruption of institutional purpose that has spread even to the leanest branch of our armed forces:
When I first came to Washington in 1973 to join the staff of Senator Robert Taft, Jr. of Ohio, I assumed naïvely that our armed forces defined themselves in terms of winning battles, campaigns and wars. Senator Taft thought that is what they should be about, which is why working for him was both a pleasure and an honor. But I quickly discovered that for three of the four, victory was defined less in military than in bureaucratic and political terms. The Army, the Navy and the Air Force had already lost sight of their institutional purposes. What they were about, at senior levels, was selling programs and getting money from Congress. Whether the program had any relevance to war was not important, so long as it sold.
And the Iron Law applies to the elected bureaucracy as much as to the institutional one:
Everywhere, the gap between political spending commitments and revenue has been covered by borrowing. The entire system of redistributionism, in which the political class buys the consent of the governed with ever-increasing handouts, has come to depend on the assumption that the bond markets will always be there to be tapped for cash to fund next week’s bread and circuses.
That is the assumption that is now under threat. Greece must be bailed out in order to preserve the illusion that the borrowing can continue indefinitely, that the bill will somehow never come due. When the political class speaks of “contagion”, what they’re really worried about isn’t the solvency of German banks holding Greek paper, it’s a general flight of investors from the sovereign-debt markets.
Our political class, like the aristocrats of the French ancien regime, believes in nothing so firmly as its own indispensability. Après moi le déluge; but when the bond-investor flight happens – and it is now a matter of when, not if – the teetering Ponzi scheme that funds their self-importance will collapse.
Maybe this is a sign that the unelected bureaucracy is really in control of the elected one. Timothy Geithner could not be reached for comment.
The only good thing is that Europe will fall faster - and harder - than we will. But that fall will end any pretense of central control as the Way Of The Future. But lots of folks will get hurt in that collapse, and a lot of them will be poor.
And the Elite that caused it is unlikely to swing from the lamp posts. It will be interesting to see who takes their place.
Sigh. Today, I seem to be channeling my inner Kevin Baker.
The UK Information Commissioner (ICO) has rendered a decision (see here) on Jonathan Jones’ appeal of the UEA’s refusal to provide Prof J. Jones with the CRUTEM station data that they had previously provided to Georgia Tech. The decision that can only be characterized as a total thrashing of the University of East Anglia.
...
Some of the University’s arguments purporting to uphold their supposed “intellectual property rights” should ring as particularly contemptible to most members of the public. If climate scientists exhort the public to make personal sacrifices, it seems hypocritical that they should claim that their “intellectual property rights” prevent examination of data being used to underpin those requests to make sacrifices.
Lest the University be tempted to delay further, the Commissioner ordered the University to produce the requested data to Prof [J] Jones within 35 days, stating:
Failure to comply with the steps described above may result in the Commissioner making written certification of this fact to ths High Court pursuant to section 54 of the Act and may be dealt with as a contempt of court.
Long time readers will recognize the University of East Anglia as the "hide the decline" crowd. Their climate science data was too special to be released to the Great Unwashed.
Until now.
Long time readers will recognize Steve McIntyre as the man who trashed the "Hockey Stick", once he got his hands on the data. There's a reason that they UEA refused the Freedom Of Information Act request from him.
Let me explain, because I don't intend to be insulting here; rather, I'm being diagnostic. They say things that they don't believe to be true because they believe that this will help them convince an ignorant, sheep-like populace to vote for their policy preferences.
They know that three 10 round magazines have the same capacity as one 30 round magazine.
They know that a bayonet lug doesn't make a rifle more dangerous.
They know that you can't realistically shoot down an airplane with a rifle, even a .50 BMG
They know that real, honest-to-goodness fully automatic weapons are very heavily regulated and are used in crimes so infrequently as to be statistically meaningless.
One year into its promise of greater government transparency, the Obama administration is more often citing exceptions to the nation's open records law to withhold federal records even as the number of requests for information declines, according to a review by The Associated Press of agency audits about the Freedom of Information Act.
That's the Huffington Post, well known Wingnut Hater site.
From: Phil Jones. To: Many. Nov 16, 1999
"I've just completed Mike's Nature [the science journal] trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie, from 1981 onwards) and from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline."
Critics cite this as evidence that data was manipulated to mask the fact that global temperatures are falling. Prof Jones claims the meaning of "trick" has been misinterpreted
From Phil Jones To: Michael Mann (Pennsylvania State University). July 8, 2004
"I can't see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow — even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!"
The problem, of course, if that in each of these cases (and many more), the Internet was the medium for the information on the lying liars to sweep 'round the world. Much to the Dinosaur Media's annoyance.
And here is where we see how the bias of the MSM hurts the Progressive cause. By continually sweeping the Left's idiocies under the rug, they encourage more idiocy. The Idiocy of the Left does not self-correct, and so the Idiocy increases. Indeed, as a signaling mechanism to other Progressives, the idiocy is useful to the speaker, in establishing his anti-Wingnut bona fides. Because nobody exposes his idiocy ("Vote for it so we can see what's in it?" Srlsy?) the speaker is encouraged to go further to gain the approbation of his Tribe.
Normal people observe the workings of, say, Democratic Underground with horror. And so, how to convince Normal People to vote Democratic?
The lie is the tool of choice, lately. It's more effective (see Clinton, William Jefferson) if you avert your eyes from the actual, you know - truth. This way you can channel a righteous indignation when accused of, you know - lying.
But none dare call it a lie.
Of course, it is, and everyone knows it. Clinton did huge damage to the Democratic Party in particular, and the Progressive Institutions in general. The National Organization for Women, the Media, all covered for him because, while he was an SOB, he was their SOB.
And the Internet was there, and they'd never heard (or had forgotten) that (a) information wants to be free, and (b) the Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it. Add in John Kerry (the New York Times writing about Kerry's response to the Swift Boat Vets while never having written about the Swift Boat Vets even when this was the story of the election season for a month), John Edwards (the NYT scooped by the National Enquirer on the Baby-Daddy-while-his-wife-is-dieing story), and basically everything about Barack Obama's background.
And so, we find ourselves in a time when the People trust the media less than they trust Used Car Salesmen (apologies to car salesmen for traducing them with a comparison to shady reporters), and where people simply assume that Democrats are lying when they say any of the following:
News flash: Presidential candidate Barack Obama says I'm not going to take your guns away in front of a hand-picked crowd of Democratic supporters in Duryea, Pennsylvania — and they don’t believe him.
And lately - and most disastrously for Obama's 2012 election homes:
The joke that's going around is that the real definition of "Shovel Ready" is Obama's election chances. Unexpectedly, they're not so great, actually.
Because the Truth will out, eventually. The Progressive Movement has so encapsulated itself in a bubble of fellow travelers that they've lost their ability to absorb feedback and self correct. And so we see a wildly disproportionate response to (accurate) descriptions of reality: you must want to destroy public education, you must want elderly people to live on cat food, you must be a racist.
It's all said will full emotional commitment, which I guess is needed to keep from seeing it all in its full Clintonesque Glory. But refusing to look at the actual truth doesn't change a lie into the truth. It doesn't really make you a better liar these days.
And guess what these liberals believe the problem with Climate Change is? Go on: think of the most stupid, reality-denying, fact-ignoring, evidence-torturing tosh anyone involved in the media could possibly have to say on the subject. (H/T Climate Depot)
Yes, that’s right.
They think that the naughty yellow pixies who pull the special, magic Climat-O-Levers which control the weather have been paid by evil capitalists with fat cigars in their mouth and $ signs on their pinstripe suits to make the world’s climate all horrid so that poor, underprivileged and disabled people and endangered creatures suffer – and that the reason we don’t know about it is because the media is run by evil Conservatives who want to keep this truth a secret.
Riiiiiiight.
And so, diagnostically we can say that until the Progressive movement stops lying (or lying to themselves to justify their stupidity, which is essentially the same thing), they will keep losing, and losing big. Mussolini could beat Obama next year, which may mean that we'll have to suffer through a Romney Administration. Likely he won't do as well as Mussolini would, but there's no doubt that he'll be a damn sight better than what we have today.
We need an honest, intellectually vigorous Left. We sure don't have one.
