Monday, June 20, 2011

Hitchens on Mamet

Christopher Hitchens' review of David Mamet's The Secret Knowledge on the Dismantling of American Culture had this to say:
This is an extraordinarily irritating book, written by one of those people who smugly believe that, having lost their faith, they must ipso facto have found their reason.
That's funny because the same could be said of Hitchen's own book of atheist evangelism God is Not Great.

From Ace of Spades.

Sunday, June 19, 2011

A Shooting Memorium

Stephen Camp died a few weeks ago at the age of 59 after a sudden brain aneurysm rupture. Camp was one of the foremost online authorities on the Browning Hipower and being fan of the gun, I had the pleasure of corresponding with him a few times about holsters and related gun accessories. He was a great, helpful, and humble guy. The gunblogosphere was much quieter about this than I expected. I'm guessing this is because Stephen was a gun board fixture not really a gun blog fixture.

Accordingly my hipower joined my buckmark at the range yesterday for my going-to-be-a-father's day shoot. I shot competently. That's the general word I'd use to describe most of my shooting. At 8-10 yards, I can easily cover the group from a single magazine with my hand. Unless it's the buckmark, then it's more like my palm. Not exactly precision target shooting, but not bad.

I wish I could say that inspired by Stephen Camp's memory, the 9mm was a veritable paper slaughtering deathray. Not especially, no. Having two different grain weights of ammo going through a fixed sight gun probably didn't help either. But I'm going to be naming the hipower Stephen nonetheless.

Constitutional Responses

According to the New York Times, Clarence Thomas is breaking with judicial ethics guidelines by supporting Federal historical conservation efforts related to the Gullah/Geechee peoples of the coastal south. Thomas is himself a member of that group. Althouse and Instapundit mention that the proper response to a Supreme Court Judge with inappropriate behavior is impeachment not passive aggressive editorials.

To put it bluntly, Democrats don't want to use the I word. Not when Obama is violating the War Powers Act in Libya. Obama's defense is that it's not a war. The Libyan's military is so inferior to our own that they are no threat to us. Try not to thing about that one too hard or you might wake up your pregnant wife in the next room yelling things like "Then why are we there in the first place!" at your computer monitor. You know, like I did.

Instead they're putting a bipartisan group together to sue Obama in federal court. Really? Look if he's breaking federal law and you think it's important, impeach him. If you don't want to impeach him, then pass a bill that revokes the funding appropriation for activities in Libya. Then dare him to cross that line. If you don't have the votes for that then make political hay. Just don't think that the last one is really doing much of anything.