Quote of the Day: Elitist Bitch edition

Note that I use the "B" word after sober reflection.

Massachusetts Democrat Elizabeth Warren (you know, the one who is dumb as a rock) took a shot at Senator Scott Brown (R - Massachusetts*), saying that when she was in College, at least she didn't "take her clothes off".  She was referring, of course, to Brown, who posed for Cosmopolitan Magazine to make some money to put himself through school.

Well, this was throwing Red Meat to the talking heads.  A couple of them interviewed Brown, saying that she'd said she hadn't posed au naturelle.  His reply?

Thank God.

Your first reaction - hilarity that spews your beverage of choice across your monitor, is unworthy of a being so clearly as intelligent as yourself**.  However, a considered reaction - based on Warren's background of George Washington University, Rutgers Law School, and an associate position at a button down New York City law firm - is that she is an elitist prick who disdains someone who had to work his way up through adversity.  A reaction that thinks that she really doesn't know what many Americans do, scrambling to make ends meet and to try to better themselves.  A reaction that says that she is fundamentally disconnected from most of the people she pretends to represent.

In other words, a typical entitled Massachusetts Democrat.  Translation: dumb as a rock.

And so, we find the natural reaction - Thank God - from a regular guy who worked his tail end off to make something out of the nothing that Nature's Creator dealt him, yeah, that's a breath of fresh air.

And so, my considered reaction to Brown's reaction to Elizabeth Warren's is this:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!

We'll leave for another day speculation about Warren's reaction should a Republican some day make light of a Democratic candidate's nude pictures to put herself through school.  One can imagine her Righteous Indignation™ at the thought.

Hey Massachusetts lefties, Sitting Bull called.  He wants his Tribal Thinking back.

* It just cracks me up to be able to type that.  "Ted Kennedy's seat", and all that.

** I'm practicing my sucking up skills.  I hope I'm doing OK.

Steve Jobs and the Big Idea

Jobs was a master at asking the Simple idea.  He did it twice (well, maybe three times, but the Macintosh was basically inspired by what he saw at Xerox Parc).  The genius was in asking these Big, Simple questions, but as Edison said, "Genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration."  Jobs focused his entire company on executing the Big, Simple idea right.

Big, Simple question #1: Why can't I take all my music with me?

Anyone who remembers the day of 256k MP3 players remembers how much of a pain it was to keep changing the music you stored on them.  You could only fit 2, maybe 3 albums on the player.  The iPod changed all that.

But it was more than just having a big storage capacity: iTunes made it ridiculously easy to get your music on the iPod, and to get new music (and podcasts) from Al Gore's Intarwebz.

Big, Simple question #2: Why can't I have the Internet in my pocket?

When the iPhone was introduced, everyone said "it's a phone and an iPod."  Well, yeah, but this wasn't the big deal.  Safari on the iPhone actually made the Internet usable from a phone.  Not just email - RIM did that long before.  Browsing, and Twitter, and Facebook - because of the App Store.  Before, it was remote email and MP3s; after, it was everyone is always online.  Always.

Simple ideas, but ideas where Jobs had to push his company to invent brilliant new processes to make it actually work.  The iTunes Store.  The "pinch".  Loadable Apps, and a way to distribute them.

Nobody ever did Big and Simple like Steve Jobs.  Rest in peace.

UPDATE 6 October 2011 20:03: The Silicon Greybeard acts as Yang to my Yin (or vice versa, not that there's anything wrong with that).

UPDATE 6 October 2011 20:10:  And this is interesting:



Is this a Big, Simple idea that is something that the market won't - can't - fund?  Somehow I think I hear the ghost of Steve Jobs whispering that it will all be about a laser like focus on execution ...

Assassination by government

Jerry Pournelle wrote the post that I would like to have written, if I had had the time (or hadn't been feeling lousy):

In the old Roman Republic before the wars of Marius and Sulla it was considered sacrilege to put to death a Roman Citizen without trial. The Civil Wars changed that, and when one faction won it would publish lists of enemies who could be killed without trial or mercy if found within Roman jurisdiction. Most lists of proscription also carried rewards to those who found and executed the proscribed enemy of the people. Proscriptions also carried confiscation of property, and were used by Sulla to replenish the treasury.

...

Constitutionally the Congress is explicitly prohibited from Acts of Attainder, which is a form of Proscription adopted as an actual Act of Parliament still in theory allowable under English law, but not employed for a century or so. Under an attainder, a law is passed pronouncing a named individual or members of a particular organization or group, or possibly a named family, guilty of a capital crime and authorizing their execution without trial. No such act has been passed for more than two centuries.

...

The obvious question for discussion is whether this activity – summary execution of citizens without trial – is permissible or desirable under Constitutional Government as part of the discretionary war powers of the President, and if so, do they apply within the United States as well as in foreign nations? It is not a simple question. What acts must a citizen perform to earn a place on the proscription list?

Cicero's last words are simply outstanding, as you would expect.

He followed this up with a long and very thoughtful amplification:

Another question: if either of these American citizens had returned to the United States and come to Kennedy International where they presented their US passports at the entry booth, could they have been arrested? On what charge? Were there outstanding warrants? In the case of Samir Khan it is not clear what he could be charged with. He ran a blog, an Internet magazine – I do not know of any other involvement other than that he associated with Al Awaki who associated on line with Major Hassan. Perhaps either or both could be charged with conspiracy and with levying war against the US, but I don’t think that has been done. So: we establish that they could be killed out of hand while travelling from one place to another, neither carrying arms or engaged in any act of war, while in a foreign country: but could they have been shot down by a US Marshall while still in the part of the airport that is not yet in the United States? On international territory? Or after they stepped into the United States?

They can be killed but not arrested: it would take convening a grand jury or a warrant from a magistrate before they could be arrested at Kennedy?

I do not here seek to make life difficult for our military; but I do seek to ask questions. If American citizens can be put on a proscription list and those on that list can be killed on sight by launching high explosives as them, is it proper to ask the procedures required to get on that list?

The USA Patriot Act, enacted in haste following 9/11, is proving to be an increasing threat to old established ways of Liberty.  The Department of Homeland Security, formed in haste following 9/11, daily humiliates American citizens in ways that would have had their grandparents reaching for the tar and feathers.

It seems that the scumbag getting his dirt nap was, well, a scum bag.  But I also have questions, about how this precedent will be used in 15 or 20 years.  The history of the past decade is not encouraging.

Ever wonder why Youtube is filled with Hitler parodies, and not Stalin parodies?

Wonder no more.



Damned Beria.

Tab clearing

Not feeling well.  Blogging will resume when the fever breaks.  In the meantime, here are some links that are worth your while:

The Grand Unified Theory of Anti-Americanism.  The thesis here is that America really is an Empire, but not in the way people usually say.

The truth, in my opinion, is that Europeans hate not America, but the American government. And they hate not the American government, but the red government - Defense, the [George W Bush] White House, and maybe (quite anachronistically these days) the CIA. In other words, they are just like the San Francisco liberal who "loves her country, but doesn't trust her government." The fact that the overwhelming majority of American government employees work for the blue government simply does not occur to her in this context, and nor to the Europeans.

The foreign-policy institution of the blue government is, of course, the State Department - much as the foreign-policy institution of the red government is the Defense Department. So one way to see Europe is as a client state of State - much as Israel is a client state of Defense. No wonder they hate each other!

Europe and the Europeans is a companion piece, that extends the time period back to 1900 - 1935 or so:

Barzini writes about pre-war Britain:

Well-mannered people were also strictly forbidden to say anything witty or clever. If anything of the kind was said, usually by a foreigner or a famous Irishman, at a dinner table, silence followed. Nobody laughed. As Lord Chesterfield had written, "There is nothing so illiberal and so ill bred as audible laughter." All faces turned in mild embarrassment in the direction of the uncautious witty man. Then conservsation resumed haltingly.

The past is a weird, weird place. It's impossible for me to conceptualize what it must have been like to be a Brit at the turn of the century. This kind of excessive proper-ness is so far away from the culture I grew up in, and so far away from the English culture of the earlier (Elizabethan times) its hard to imagine how it came about.

It gets even more interesting when it describes pre-war NAZI Germany.

Stratfor on why the self-destruction of the Euro Zone is inevitable:

The realization that the rational civil servants of Brussels and Berlin have failed to create systems that understand reality strikes at German self-perceptions. There is a willful urge to retain the perception that they understand what is going on. From the standpoint of Southern and Central Europe, the realization that the Germans genuinely thought that the states on the EU periphery had reached the level of precision of the German civil services (assuming Germany had in fact reached that stage), or that they even wanted to, is a shock. Their publics, which saw the European Union as a means of getting in on German prosperity without undergoing a massive social upheaval putting the state and the civil service -- disciplined and rational -- at the center of their society, experienced an even greater shock.

Detritus of Empire is an archaeologist, and looks at the world of today with an archaeologist's eye:

Win.

Lego Gears Of War fully automatic Lancer rifle

With working chainsaw attachment, because those zombies won't cut themselves in two ...



Make sure you watch it all the way through, to see how the mechanisms work.   The music, of course, is Gustav Holst, Mars the bringer of war, from The Planets.

You, too can make Bad-Ass Lego guns.  There's a book that describes how; unsurprisingly, it's called Bad-Ass Lego Guns:



Via The Register.

Why Intellectuals infuriate me

They write drivel like this:

Ordinary folks might be unable to marshal facts and figures to counter such ludicrous claims, but they know bullshit when they see it. This has two effects on them: One, they feel profoundly disempowered watching their leaders deploy their smarts not on their behalf but against them. And two, since they can’t become experts and academics, they resist by retreating into their own simple certitudes drawn from folk wisdom, faith and founding principles. Indeed, Sarah Palin is as much Barack Obama’s gift to America as she is John McCain’s.

The great political divide right now is not between eggheads and blockheads, as Maureen Dowd puts it, or intellectualism and stupidity, as other self-serving liberal pundits sneer. It is between two types of activism: an irresponsible, pseudo-intellectual one and a retrograde, folksy one.

Look, I have as many intellectual bona fides as anyone, and more than most.  And this simply infuriates me.  It assumes that only an intellectual is fit to serve as President.  Not only is that entirely unoriginal (dating back to Plato's Republic), but it's been known for decades that this is bollox of the first order.

And the author - Reason's Shikha Dalmia - clearly has absolutely no idea about this, while she drones on and on about how Republicans are dim witted, anti-intellectual bumpkins too stupid to understand what's going on:

Sarah Palin and Michele Bachmann—women with better hairdos than heads ...

Republican intellectual defensiveness has hardened into intellectual goofiness. No longer is stupidity a disqualification, even for the highest office in the land. Palin, in fact, has turned her lack of intellectual talent into her biggest asset, like Snooki on “Jersey Shore.” ...

I've said before that I don't know if Palin would be a good president, but (a) it's hard to see her as worse than Obama, (b) she's clearly less loopy that Joe Biden, who sits today a heartbeat away from the Oval Office, and (c) Palin is changing politics in the country is a way that Dalmia simply can't seem to comprehend.

But the kicker is that Ms. Dalmia is entirely happy to lurch into a blanket condemnation of the majority of this country for being unthinking, while presenting her very own unthinking bona fides on display for us here.  And not just the examples here - she serves up one herself:

The great hope from Obama was that he would be different. That his thoughtful, professorial demeanor would prompt him to look for policies that worked—not push a preconceived agenda. In fact, when he took office, I hoped that he would be an “empirical president” who dispassionately considered the evidence from all sides before making decisions.

Huh?  What sort of idiot expected this?  The Shikha Dalmia sort of idiot, that's who.  You know, the type that still doesn't get it that intellectuals do not - and should not - have the trust of the majority of Americans, because they keep screwing up.  Dalmia points this out in her article, and still complains that Americans are doing this.

She could have done some honest self-analysis.  Instead, she looks at who's in the Intellectual in-group, and sneers at thom she's placed in the Intellectual out-group.  That's one righteous display of brain power, right there.

Hey Ms. Dalmia - Sitting Bull called.  He wants his Tribal Thinking back.

That's why I don't like to hang with Intellectuals very much anymore.  Not only are they mostly stupid, they combine unthinking self-unawareness with viciousness in equal measures.  It's too much drivel for me to stomach.

I'd like a higher caliber drivel, please.

The Renaissance Blitzkreig and the birth - and death - of the Westphalian State

Technology develops slowly, step by step.  It rarely comes in a bolt from the blue - that happens when someone figures out that a tipping point has been reached.  Then the change is dramatic, and sudden, and there's no going back.

Alexander the Great was one of these tipping point moments.  Charles VIII was another.

France in 1494 was only 40 years past the end of the Hundred Years' War with England.  And yet this still half-Medieval, half Renaissance kingdom had done something that none of the other European states had: it had grown big enough that it was able to invest serious money in the new-fangled cannons (actually, not even known by that name yet).  While other princes used the hugely heavy, unwieldy monsters like those that had battered down the walls of Constantinople a couple decades prior, the French had invested in better casting techniques, and better design. 

(Image source)

The result was a light, strong, and mobile weapon that could  quickly be brought into action (rather than taking a day or two to emplace).  They could fire two or three rounds a minute, rather than two or three a day.  And rather than the traditional stone cannon balls - which would crack on impact - they fired cast iron shot.  The shot was propelled by a new form of gunpowder, - corned powder, which burned more efficiently and could impart more velocity to the shot.  Essentially, the cannon had reached the form that it would retain through the Crimean War.

Charles marched his French army Hannibal-like across the Alps into Italy.  The ran into an army from the Kingdom of Naples, fortified in the massive castle at Mordano.  The Neapolitans might have been excused at being a bit complacent, after all, the castle had withstood sieges lasting years.  The French wheeled their guns up to the gate, and three hours later had reduced it to rubble.  Charles' soldiers rushed through the breech, and slaughtered everyone inside.

Castle after castle fell not in weeks, or days, but hours.  Piero di Medici fled Florence.  Rome itself threw open its gates to the invaders.  Alfonso II of Naples rested his hopes on his strongest fortress at Monte San Giovanni.  It took Charles' guns eight hours to batter it open.  Alfonso abdicated.  In four months, Charles had marched the length of Italy.

(Image Source)

He had also changed forever the way that war was waged.  The day of the City-State had passed, since only national monarchies had enough money to equip an army with artillery.  Two years after Columbus discovered Terra Nova, the modern Westphalian State was born.

Charles didn't live to see it, cracking his head on a low door in his palace and dieing.  But the new century saw the rise of Nations: first Spain, then England of Good Queen Bess, then the Scandinavian realms that led to Gustav Adolf.  By then, the New World had been planted with colonies, and Charles' successor Louis le Roi Soleil was building Versailles. 

The tipping point was sudden, and bloody, and there was no turning back.  We're at a new tipping point, where the Westphalian State is nearing the end of its viability.  Networked information and networked warfare has made the old ways unviable. The situation is much like that facing the Italian City-States in 1493.  All seemed calm and well understood.  Predictable.

Who today's Charles VIII will be, and when he will kick down the old, complacent order: that's anyone's guess.

(Image source)

TheOnesDay® No. 15

It's Wednesday (err, TheOnesDay™), and so it's time for your regularly scheduled mockery of the Egghead Leader who's supposed to transcend our mediocrity.

Mussolini sent a telegram to Hitler.  ARMY IN GOOD RUNNING SHAPE.  STOP.  SRLSY.  FULL STOP.

What's that?  Why joke about Mussolini, rather than the Lightbringer?  Well it's because Il Duce would crush TheOne in an election.  Srlsy.  The Obama campaign is fixin to get the message presently, and that message reads FULL STOP.

Alinksy's rules, everybody.  They worked for decades to take over the system; show them that The Man is still a ripe target for mockery.

Why do Democrats hate women?

Wow.  Just, wow.

Objectively, they're sexist. 

Can every Progressive who ever said that Rethuglicans hate women please shut up and sit down in the back of the room?  Grown ups are talking.

And to all Progressives who ever said the words Let's pass it now; we'll fix it later: OK, it's later.  Come on - dazzle me.

Wow.  Just, wow.

UPDATE 4 October 2011 23:09: Holy cow, this really isn't the Internet spreading unfounded rumors:

A federal rule kicked in Saturday that will prevent many applicants from qualifying for new credit card accounts.


The Federal Reserve's rule told credit card companies that they no longer can consider household income when assessing the creditworthiness of an individual who applies for his or her own card. Under the rule, only an individual's own salary or other income -- rather than combined household income -- can be considered.


One major effect of the new regulation: Stay-at-home moms (or dads) without significant outside income no longer will be able to open their own credit card accounts -- and establish their own credit histories to build their credit scores.

And here's the really damning quote on this legislative abortion [same link]:

"I've worked with Brad, he's come up with some pretty good ideas and I like the concept very much," Durbin said.

I like the concept very much. Wow.

Well, this explains the Democratic Party's 2008 primary.  Hey Hillary, go make me a sammich!  Now, biatch!

Wow.

UPDATE 5 October 00:18: A serenade for the National Organization for Women (Senator Ted Kennedy and President Bill Clinton could not be reached for comment):

What do you get for pretending the danger's not real.
Meek and obedient you follow the leader
Down well trodden corridors into the valley of steel.
What a surprise!
A look of terminal shock in your eyes.

For lo, He hath great power, and great hunger ....

Sheep (songwiters: Pink Floyd)

Harmlessly passing your time in the grassland away;
Only dimly aware of a certain unease in the air.
You better watch out,
There may be dogs about
I've looked over Jordan, and I have seen
Things are not what they seem.

What do you get for pretending the danger's not real.
Meek and obedient you follow the leader
Down well trodden corridors into the valley of steel.
What a surprise!
A look of terminal shock in your eyes.
Now things are really what they seem.
No, this is no bad dream.

The Lord is my shepherd, I shall not want
He makes me down to lie
Through pastures green He leadeth me the silent waters by.
With bright knives He releaseth my soul.
He maketh me to hang on hooks in high places.
He converteth me to lamb cutlets,
For lo, He hath great power, and great hunger.
When cometh the day we lowly ones,
Through quiet reflection, and great dedication
Master the art of karate,
Lo, we shall rise up,
And then we'll make the bugger's eyes water.

Bleating and babbling I fell on his neck with a scream.
Wave upon wave of demented avengers
March cheerfully out of obscurity into the dream.

Have you heard the news?
The dogs are dead!
You better stay home
And do as you're told.
Get out of the road if you want to grow old.

You better stay home, and do as you're told.  Get out of the road, if you want to grow old.  After all, this Administration's motto is Bros before Hoes.

So now, NOW, go fix the Democratic Party a sammitch ...

Lo, we shall rise up,
And then we'll make the bugger's eyes water.

National Organization for Women, wake up.  It's not just about abortion, and the Democrats despise you.  Just sayin'.

Understanding the Global Warming debate

You want to understand the situation?  Not much will give you a better start than here:



Of course, if you want to get sciency and everything, you could start here.

Yeah, it's kind of old.  I'm clearing tabs, and if I haven't worked this into an uber post in 2 months, it's not happening.

Quote of the Day - Vive la differance edition

A bit ago, I posted about some Internet chatter from some smart people about mating habits.  Labrat takes a look at the discussion, and focuses some high energy coherence on the topic:

Or, to put it in blunter terms: if your economic model shows a good that is given away for free thirty percent of the time but is still routinely paid for at a much higher price, either the market is in serious trouble and is about to collapse completely out of existence any day now, or your model is completely fucked for describing and predicting what you’re actually looking at.

Me?  I still don't have a clue.  After all, I've been married 23 years, so I'm the last guy you'd want to ask about what the young ladies are looking for.  But all the discussions make me think, which is a Good Thing.  Labrat - as is her habit - makes me think a lot, which is a Very Good Thing Indeed.

You want to bump your IQ a notch or two, you should be reading the Nerds.

The 2011 IgNobel Prize Awards!

The new scientific hotness isn't the Nobel Prize (heck, they'll give one to any crackpot), but the IgNobel Prize.  It's scientific inside baseball, but such fabulous scientific inside baseball:

PSYCHOLOGY PRIZE: Karl Halvor Teigen of the University of Oslo, NORWAY, for trying to understand why, in everyday life, people sigh.

REFERENCE: "Is a Sigh 'Just a Sigh'? Sighs as Emotional Signals and Responses to a Difficult Task," Karl Halvor Teigen, Scandinavian Journal of Psychology, vol. 49, no. 1, 2008, pp. 49–57.

ATTENDING THE CEREMONY: Karl Halvor Teigen

Of course, we all knew that a sigh is just a sigh, but now it's all proven and everything.  The Science is settled™.

Duce 2012

Well, it sure won't be Obama.  Reason points us to a new poll of what Americans are most concerned about right now.  They have a nifty graphic to show this; rather than the usual boring old bar chart, they have a tag cloud.  The bigger the word, the more important it registered in the poll.

Let's see how Obama is doing, shall we?

Economy?  Fail.
Jobs?  Fail.
Debt/Deficits/Spending?  Fail.
Government/Big Government?  Fail
Division?  Fail (this one's particularly bad, because he promised the independents that he'd be not your average politician here).

The People's Cube sums it up:

In the poll questions that count, Il Duce beats him handily.  And there wasn't even a question about whether the trains run on time.

Seen inside FOB Borepatch

Back at Chez Borepatch, we had a screened in porch.  I'd run speaker wire to it, back when we added on to the house, and that part of the house was not much more than skeleton.  I hooked it up to the Home Theater system, so we could listen to music, under the candle light.

Trishia Yearwood was one of our favorites, and this was one of the favorites from her.



Well at FOB Borepatch, a thousand miles from home, there's music, and candles, and the kids.

Once you agree upon the price you and your family must pay for success, it enables you to ignore the minor hurts, the opponent's pressure, and the temporary failures.

- Vince Lombardi

Blogroll additions

Life in 3D is written by a Navy veteran who's now into computer game design.  He's also a new father, and tells us what happens when you add one part infant, one part Grandmother, one part bouncy chair, and one part baby's favorite food.  Shake over ice, and garnish with a mess.  Heh.

Duke is blogging at Down Range Report, and brings some interesting news:

I stumbled across something I think most people don't know, ANY legal US resident is eligible to get a Florida Concealed Weapons Permit. This means even if you live in California, NY or any other state that is very restrictive on permits there is no excuse not to have a CCW permit.

Huh.  The number of things I simply did not know seems pretty big.

The snark is strong at LMAObama.  It's just about exactly what you'd expect: Every day is TheOnesDay™:

Old Glory First bills itself as "an experiment in collaborative idea sharing, mixed with open discussion."  Blogging seems somewhat sporadic there, so stop by and leave an encouraging comment.  Comments are like crack to bloggers, just sayin'.


West of the West blogs a lot about music (of the non-Country variety), but brings the turn of phrase in bushel basket loads: I saw a werewold drinking a pina colada in the mirror.  Heh.  Wonder if his hair was perfect.  Plus, the Wookie Suit di tutti Wookie Suits.  Double heh.


Welcome to the blogroll!

OK, I'm in

Me, I don't hate women or gays.  Or native peoples.  Or the environment.

I'm all over this Ethical Oil idea like stink on a dog.  They have a permanent, free blog ad on the right sidebar*.  I recommend that you add them to your blog.

Lefties, this is your time to shine.  You can support a brutal Saudi dictatorship that kills homosexuals, doesn't care if it destroys the environment, and keeps women as second class citizens.

Or you can send your money to Canada to buy the same thing.  They don't do any of these things.

To be explicit, if you object, then you are objectively misogynist, gay bashing, and Gaia raping.  Srlsy.  You know That Guy who's like this?  Don't be That Guy.

Via Flares into Darkness, who has must-read background on this situation.

* Note to FTC: Free as in speech, not free as in beer.

Note [2] to FTC: Look it up.

Note [3] to FTC: While you're at it, look up the First Amendment.

Note [4] to FTC: While you're at it, get a real job you leeches.

Then and now

The People's Cube brings it.

So Congress can prohibit free speech by 18-20 year olds?

A Federal Judge says a blanket prohibition of 18-20 year olds buying handguns - not just regulation - doesn't violate their second amendment rights:

A federal judge in Lubbock has blocked a National Rifle Association suit that claimed an age requirement on gun purchases was unconstitutional. The judge ruled that federal restrictions barring people younger than 21 from buying a gun do not violate the Second Amendment.

...

United States District Judge Sam R. Cummings wrote the opinion. He wrote, “The right to bear arms is enjoyed only by those not disqualified from the exercise of the Second Amendment rights."

Congress identified a legitimate state interest—public safety—and passed legislation that is rationally related to addressing that issue—the ban; thus, it acted within its constitutional powers and in accordance with the Equal Protection Clause.

In essence, it is within the purview of Congress, not the courts, to weigh the relative policy considerations and to make decisions as to the age of the customer to whom those
licensed by the federal government may sell handguns and handgun ammunition.

Well, let's try this out:

Determining who has the right to petition Congress is a decision within the purview of Congress, not the courts.  How's that?

Or, determining who may be compelled to testify against themselves is a decision within the purview of Congress, not the courts. Cool?

Didn't think so.  Of course, I didn't go to an elite University, so I'm clearly an idiot.  IANL, but I hope that the NRA appeals this.  We haven't yet seen all the dust settle from Heller and McDonald.  But the ruling that you have a fundamental right to keep and bear arms seems like it will ripple through the case law, even to situations like this.

The Rieger Bolt Action Pistol

(Image source)

The early days of self-loading pistols give us some marvelous failed designs, as inventors tried different approaches to see what might solve the problem.  This typically took the form of seeing what worked in other types of firearms and adapting it to pistols.

In the 1880s, bolt-action mechanisms were the rage in rifles.  Perhaps, seemingly thought Erwin Rieger, this might work in a pistol, too?

The question was how to propel the bolt backwards and forwards.  If that could be accomplished, the details of extracting the spent case, ejecting it, and stripping a new cartridge for loading were well understood.  Since pistols were assumed to be one-handed weapons, a side mounted bolt actuator would not do.

Herr Rieger solved this problem by a lever actuated by a ring in front of the trigger.  Pushing the ring forward opened the bolt, ejecting the spent cartridge.  Pulling the ring back closed the bolt, chambering a new round.  It might be more accurate to call this a lever action pistol, but the very limited information I've been able to find (nothing on the Internet (!); a short reference in Ian Hogg's The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Firearms) describes it as a bolt action, inspired by military rifles.

It was perhaps inspired by the Passler & Siedel model of 1887, but the inspiration very well may have gone the other direction.  The Passler & Siedel looks more advanced, with a removable magazine.  It's a bit of a stretch to think that Rieger would have dropped a feature like this.

(Image source)

Alas for this marvelous design, it seems to have only worked well when the pistol was clean and oiled.  When dirty or dry, the lever took great physical strength in the finger to cycle the action.  Newer designs that used the energy of the fired round to work the action swept the field.

But there is a pleasure in the hunt for the fossilized remains from the Pleistocene Age of self-loading pistols.