Collective Rights

Mick Hartley extensively quotes some folks writing about the UN human rights apparatus, and how it's circling the bowl. This bit struck me:

...the African Commission for Human and Peoples' Rights has added 'peoples' as the rightful beneficiaries of human rights, so that governments, as their legal representatives, have assumed for themselves the rights of their people.

Faultlessly progressive, of course. And familiar: The "collective rights" interpretation of the Second Amendment holds that the word "people" in the text refers to the government acting as a proxy for the actual people. So you've got the powers of government, and delicately balanced against them you've got the rights of the people, which are actually exercised by the government. "Somebody's got to take care of it for them", remember? Now, once the government controls everything, that's pretty dangerous, right? So you've got to make sure the only people who get control are ones who'll always do what's right. You do that by banning all the other political parties. And mobilizing the people (both the actual people, and the rulers acting on their behalf) against the kulaks, or whatever, as needed.

The Teleprompter Has Tax Problems

Teleprompter runs roughshod over the Smartest Administration Ever. Well, these things happen.

Thank God I voted for Jeff Lynne.

Daschle

Hey, Daschle looks kind of like my uncle. The one who drinks.

UPDATE

No, the other one who drinks.

White powder on Wall Street?

Gee, that's a shock.

DISSENT NO LONGER PATRIOTIC

Make a note of it.

Happy Ascension Day

Jeff Cooper:

Have you noticed that adulation is not dependant upon the adulated? People need to worship heroes regardless of whether they can find heroes or not. Just place anybody up on a pedestal where he can be seen and you will find thousands of people who will scream and yell and beg for his autograph. Thus we have "mass movements."

Unmutual! Unmutual!

Not just any roller rink, nor even just any disco roller rink. A HUGE disco roller rink.

Some people, some silly, unimportant, flyover-country kind of people, don't understand why they need people from Hollywood like Cameron Diaz and Tim Robbins to tell them what to think. "Why should I figure them fellers in Hollywood is so much smarter than we are, anyhow?" they ask. Well, here's why. Here's why, when our betters out there in the land of the silver screen have something to say to us, we just might want to shut our drooling yaps, open up our empty little minds, and listen:

The Greek muses incarnate themselves on Earth to inspire men to achieve. One of them, incarnated as a girl named Kira¹, encounters an artist named Sonny Malone. With the help of Danny McGuire, a man Kira had inspired forty years earlier, Sonny builds a huge disco roller rink.

When you can come up with a story like that, maybe you'll be qualified to run this country. Until then, shut up and pay your taxes, OK, Gomer?

 

¹ Played by Olivia Newton-John

"The Black Legend"

Huh: To what degree is our perception of the Spanish mentality a product of Protestant propaganda during the Reformation and in succeeding centuries? Probably not less than zero, and quite likely not more than some value greater than zero. In round numbers.

I recall reading recently, somewhere, that the Spanish Inquisition, while it really was pretty darn bad, was less maximally horrible than people seem to assume. Or so this source claimed, whoeverthehell it was. Hm. So, OK, for whatever that's worth.

Intent

Huffman has a programming funny. Which reminds me of a good one about Pascal that I thought of, only a decade or so after Pascal had become too irrelevant to bother making fun of:

Programming languages are tools programmers use to make computers do arbitrary things. Pascal is a tool Nick Werth used to make programmers do arbitrary things.

UPDATE

Maybe you had to be there.

OK, I figured it out

The purpose of our endless rising tide of petty laws and regulations is to prevent the individual from doing any harm, and so make life better for everybody except the individual. Since there's only one of him, that's a pretty good deal for, statistically speaking, everybody. Except the rest of us, obviously.

Church and State

Jeff Cooper says,

We may not wish to be taught how to think by clergymen, but to me it seems much worse to be taught how to think by politicians.

Heh.

...and annoyed.

Jeff Cooper quotes E.V. Howe, via somebody named Bill O'Connor:

"The government is mainly an expensive organization to regulate evil doers, and tax those who behave. Government does little for fairly respectable people, except annoy them."

That's actually wrong. The government doesn't regulate evildoers; it merely tries to. That is to say, it annoys them.

All government really does to anybody is annoy them. And invoice the fairly respectable ones for the service.

Now I feel stimulated, too!

All news is old by the time it reaches me, but anyhow I like "voting Democrat" as a euphemism for "dead".

Caroline Kennedy

It's not all adoration for poor Caroline.

The New York Times said "she seemed less like a candidate than an idea of one: eloquent but vague, largely undefined and seemingly determined to remain that way."

Duh. Last time the Democrats ran one of those, he won the presidency.

But the NYT thought vague-and-undefined looked good on that one, so, yeah, I guess it's different.

STFU, Gun Dude

Just recently took to operating one of those little L-shaped black things that turn money into a loud BANG. So I'm reading up on this and that, and I got to wondering what a "two-stage trigger" is. You figure Google is the place to start with a thing like that, but maybe not:

So let's understand [sic] the differences between "take-up" and "creep." Take-up is a wonderfully replicated feeling/action, found in 2 stage triggers, in preparation of firing, and creep is when you think you are trying to fire, but you just seem to keep pulling the trigger & it does not break cleanly. Creep is found in both single & double stage triggers.

Well, there it is: A two-stage trigger is one that has a "wonderfully replicated feeling/action", except that some of them have the other thing, which is something else, and you don't want that. Whatever it is. But so I took my pistol out and tried dry-firing it, and while for all I know the feeling/action may have been "replicated", I don't beleve it was wonderfully so. Therefore, I may have a two-stage trigger, or I may not. Which is a comfort.

There are some subjects I do know something about: Electric guitars and amplifiers, and programming computers, within certain limits. When I see somebody wasting a novice's time with non-information or anti-information about tube amps or intonation or operator overloading in C++, or JavaScript in general¹, I can see the humor in it.

So it's fairly weird to find myself, well on in adulthood, being the one whose time is arbitrarily wasted by fools.

 

¹ Last I checked, pretty much 99% of what there was to be read about JavaScript online was clueless bullshit. They returned tuples in arrays. They didn't know what closures were. Sad stuff. The people who write about it are not programmers. I don't know what the hell they are.

UPDATE

But look at it this way: If pain is the sensation of weakness leaving the body, this kind of frustration is the sensation of knowledge entering it. If it's unfamiliar, it must have been too long since you learned anything new.

Fun Facts About Grizzly Bears

THEY WILL EAT YOU.

And if you're stupid, they'll eat you even more.

Compulsory Biodegradable Euro Committee

Mick Hartley informs us that the Oxford University Press is helping acclimate the youth of Britain to their new habitat, by updating their Junior Dictionary. They're sweeping out silly old words like "vicar" and "blackberry" to make room for "compulsory", "biodegradable", "Euro", "committee", and others.

Imagine the sadness of balanced meals, stepping on a human face, forever.

UPDATE

Wait, they're getting rid of "Blackberry"?!

Well, that's the way it goes with folks like that: Up to the minute, always, but the minute they're up to had its day a decade back.

If it weren't for that darn Constitution...

Tamara K says:

A contentious theory I've often heard advanced is that if you told the police in any major metropolis "One hundred people. You know who they are. Go round them up," and they actually went out and got The Usual Suspects off the street at the same time, that crime in the burg in question would virtually dry up overnight

...and wonders what readers think about that notion. She's asking for input from law enforcement, not from random assholes with excessive self-esteem, so I won't leave a mess of my own in her comments.

But it sounds like a common species of wishful thinking: "The government could trivially fix this problem if only they had arbitrary powers."

Look at it that way, and ask yourself when any government with arbitrary powers ever fixed anything. Or more specifically, when any police force with arbitrary powers ever put a stop to anything.

Some law enforcement types may believe they could do it. Personally, I think they're mistaken.

50mm?

You can't hide the facts from The Associated Press:

In this image made available in London, Thursday Feb. 28, 2008, Britain's Prince Harry mans a 50mm machinegun, at an observation post close to Forward Operating Base Delhi, in Afghanistan, on Wednesday Jan. 2, 2008. ...

Fifty millimeters? That's two inches. .50 maybe? Bit small for that isn't it? A .50 BMG cartridge is almost six inches long. Betcha somebody at the AP either saw "7.62x51 NATO" on the press handout and helpfully "corrected" it, or saw "machine gun" and threw in "50" just because he vaguely remembered the number "50" has something to do with machine guns, and then "mm" because he vaguely remembered millimeters have something to do with guns in general.

Best and fondest wishes to Prince H, by the way, and to all who serve with him. Finest traditions and all that. Makes a man proud to have, through no virtue of his own, been born in a country where people speak English. Whatever's wrong with his dad, I guess it's not inheritable. I hope they don't make him go home now the story's leaked.

Tetris? Fuck off.

WTF?

They're going to make you pay for Tetris

To paraphrase Slate's Justin Peters, "Why give you free Tetris when they can sell you $7 Tetris?" Seriously, screw those guys!

No, they are not going to make you pay for Tetris. Don't want it? Don't buy it. I don't want it. I didn't buy it. Did they make me pay for it? No.

STFU, retard.

P.S. Dennis Kucinich? Retard. STFU.