A READER EMAILS: “Your online shopping recommendations are usually pretty good, so I was wondering if you had a preferred ammunition supplier?” I recommend my former students’ company, LuckyGunner.com. I’ve ordered from them several times with uniformly satisfactory results.
Archive for 2011
August 8, 2011
FROM BRYAN PRESTON, a ΜΟΛΩΝ ΛΑΒΕ mood.
ED DRISCOLL INTERVIEWS MARK STEYN about Steyn’s new book, After America, which picked a good week to debut. “I received a copy of his book from his publicist on Wednesday, the Dow Jones dropped 512 points on Thursday, and S&P shorted America’s credit rating on Friday. Now that’s a publicity campaign.”
UPDATE: Steyn link fixed now. Sorry!
BRITAIN: Riots Spread Across And Beyond London. Unlike L.A., there are no Korean shopkeepers with AR-15s to help contain the looting.
UPDATE: A BBC coverage page.
Plus, The Telegraph’s live coverage.
And some perspective: Democrats Continue To Accuse The Tea Party Of Terrorism As Leftists Burn London To The Ground.
ANOTHER UPDATE: Reader George Milonas writes:
The problem with comparing London and Korean shopkeepers is two fold. First, all the property owners and law abiding citizens have been disarmed. So unless a man is going to stab all these felons to death, there really is no self defense. And it’s hard to defend against flying molotov cocktails. And Second, the British Government has made it perfectly clear that they’re willing to incarcerate anyone who defends himself. They have proven this time and again by prosecuting the law abiding citizens who are afraid for their lives.
So in essence, the British government has effectively defanged their first responders in favor of their own police forces who are obviously inadequate to deal with this circumstance.
It’s wholesale surrender on a French scale.
The Gods Of The Copybook Headings avert their eyes.
MORE: Andrew Stuttaford: London Tonight. Plus, are U.S. media soft-pedaling coverage?
Well, as Walter Russell Mead noted, they’ve been soft-pedaling here already.
STILL MORE: “These riots could be Cameron’s Falklands War.”
Plus: “If he comes back from holiday, and it makes no difference, what’s the point of having a Prime Minister?”
ANDREW KLAVAN: Insults, Stupid Arguments, And Lies.
MARKDOWNS ON CAMERA ACCESSORIES: Cases, backpacks, flash memory, and more.
PRESIDENT DOWNGRADE: A reader sends this image for the new era. I think it works!
SECURITY NEVER SEEMS TO BE SUCH A BIG PRIORITY: Child finds flaws in mobile games.
A novel class of security problems have been found lurking in many mobile games by a ten-year old hacker.
Going by the handle CyFi, the hacker presented her findings at the DefCon hacker conference held in Las Vegas.
She found that advancing the clock on a tablet or phone can, in many games, open a loophole that can be exploited.
CyFi discovered the bug after getting bored with the pace of farming games and seeking ways to speed them up.
Good grief. Now give that girl a scholarship.
I LIKE THIS: Boeing Workers Will Fly to ISS Aboard Their Company’s New Spaceship. “This is the best job perk we’ve seen in some time: Work for Boeing, go to space. The aerospace firm is planning to send its own employees to the International Space Station on the first crewed mission of its CST-100 ship, the company said Friday. Apparently internal interviews are already ongoing, because Boeing wants its astronauts to help drive further development of the space capsule.”
ANTICIPATING THE COMING CONVULSIONS as the welfare state dies. Both here and in Europe. It’s never pretty when they run out of other people’s money. “The problem with the Tea Party is not what it does – at best, right now, it can only make a moral and political case; it does not have the numbers to make anything happen without non-Tea Partiers joining it. The problem with the Tea Partiers, in the eyes of the liberal establishment and the pet moderate GOP enablers, is that it dares to point out the indisputable truth that must be hidden at all costs: That the social welfare state is unsustainable and will collapse.”
UPDATE: Reader Anthony Calabrese writes:
As an American in London, I am seeing it first hand. Your statement about the welfare state’s death convulsions are true — there is a small business owner on BBC news talking now about a restaurant of his getting trashed in Ealing, a rather nice part of West London. He noted that despite all the talk of this being a response to poverty, the looters are wearing designed tracksuits and communicating by I-Phones.
This family has had a furniture business in South London for 140 years. No longer — it is burning to the ground right now.
There even was a street fire in my neighbourhood of Notting Hill.
One difference from the US is that in London, there is much more mixing of socio-economic groups than in the US. So I think we may see a long night.
Be prepared.
PRESIDENT DOWNGRADE: Dow Finishes Down 634 Points. Obama’s speech certainly did nothing to slow the drop, though I suppose the White House will argue that it would have been 734 without the speech, meaning that Obama saved or created 100 Dow points . . . .
I STILL LIKE MY RX-8, WHICH I’VE HAD FOR MORE THAN 8 YEARS NOW: Mazda still pursuing rotary development.
MARY KATHARINE HAM: Save Money Just Like Uncle Sam!
DANIEL J. MITCHELL: Obama’s Failed Response to the Downgrade and the Outlook for Fixing America’s Spending Crisis. “President Obama just spoke about the downgrade and his remarks were very disappointing. He uttered some empty platitudes, offered no plan, (amazingly) called for more government spending, and continued his advocacy of class-warfare taxation.”
UPDATE: “Horrifyingly bad.” “He was a half hour late. His head turned from side to side as if he were attending a tennis match. He practically never looked in the camera, as if he were averting our gaze. And those were the strong parts of President Obama’s disastrous speech. It was a bit like a slow-motion car crash. After a while, one stopped listening to the blather and simply watched the stock ticker go down and down. And down some more.”
ANOTHER UPDATE: More reactions. “These were President Obama’s first remarks since the credit downgrade last Friday. While he did not specifically blame the Tea Party as his allies have, he did suggest that they are to blame by invoking ‘gridlock’ as one of the downgrade’s causes. While the president spoke, the markets continued to slide downward.”
The White House and much of the chattering class cooed on Friday when unemployment dropped to 9.1 percent and 117,000 jobs were reportedly created in July. But these numbers, upon closer inspection, show no progress on the jobs front.
Buried in the job stats was a number — 193,000 — that dwarfed all the rest. That is the number of workers who left the job market. If 193,000 left and only 117,000 jobs were added, we lost 76,000 jobs. Moreover, this is not an aberration.
Read the whole thing.
EVERY SINGLE ONE: Politicized Hiring At The Department Of Justice. “For nearly a year, the Civil Rights Division rebuffed Pajamas Media’s Freedom of Information Act request for the resumes of attorneys hired into the Division during the tenure of Eric Holder. PJM was finally forced to file a federal lawsuit earlier this year. Only then did Justice relent and turn over the documents. The result leaves little wonder why PJM’s request was met with such intense resistance.”
NANOTECHNOLOGY UPDATE: Molecular Information Theory Points To Robust Molecular Communications.
WELL, THAT WASN’T WORTH WAITING AN EXTRA HOUR FOR. Maybe the speech looked better on TV than it sounded on the radio, but maybe not.
WISE WORDS for tough times.
DOES THAT MEAN WE CAN SUE THE SAFETY NAZIS? Toxic chemicals found in over half of children’s car seats.
THE HEALTH ADVANTAGES OF low-Omega-6 eggs.
THE FUTURE OF THE CAR INDUSTRY: Kit Cars?