The Hatter Grins

The first semi-auto I shot when I lived in FL was a Glock. Friend and coworker owned it. 'Twas a Glock 19, and I think between the two of us, we easily burned through 300 rounds of ammo.

Fun gun to shoot, but not one I would seriously consider owning if I had other alternatives.

Xavier seems to echo some of my reservations against this very popular brand of autoloader, especially in the lack-of-a-manual-safety department. This tends to be among the top three complaints against Glocks (the other two being their plastic frames, and the fact they are not a ).

However, he puts an angle on it that I really hadn't thought of before:

I dislike the safety on the trigger. The whole idea seems silly to me. A gun ought not go off unless the trigger is pulled. So to make the gun safer through a mechanical means, it only follows that the mechanical safety be independent of the trigger.

Sagely observation, if I do say so myself.

I will echo his respect for the firearm, though. They are reliable, and their modularity allows you to exchange certain parts between them if one breaks. And if a person shoots well with a Glock, more power to them.

But otherwise, nothing beats a H&K.

Pius XII up for beatification

Read it while perusing Der Spiegel yesterday.

Go ahead and read the article. It's in English.

Some of the regular readers (who have probably dropped off after I had pretty much fallen off the blogging scene) are probably wondering "what's with all the foreign newspapers?"

I can read them (along with Spanish and French...working on Dutch this winter), and sometimes you get a different perspective than what is found in the US media.

Take Sarah Palin's nomination as VP running mate, for example. I went through several Norwegian, German, Spanish, Danish, Swedish, and French online newspapers a good part of that day. Whereas the U.S. leftist propaganda machine was pretty quick to try to find dirt on something that took attention from their anointed one















Most of the European press looked on with what I would describe as "positive curiosity." Interestingly enough, as much as our propaganda machine likes to look at "world opinion," they didn't seem all that hot on sharing in the relatively positive attitude the Euro newspapers I looked at had.

But anyway, getting back to the story at hand...

Pius XII was the Pope during WWII. He is currently up for "beatification," which is the Catholics' way of putting someone on the track toward sainthood.

I'm not all that familiar with the process, and my own theological proclivities find it to be something of a waste of time and energy, but regardless of which side of the confessional fence you stand on, beatification pretty much points out a Catholic personality of note.

Whether or not you were a Jew during this time, "note" might bear some pretty negative connotations. A fair amount of people are not terribly thrilled with Benedict XVI's motion to go on with the beatification process, partially out of speculation that Pius XII (né Eugenio Pacelli) did not do nearly enough to help save persecuted Jews during the Holocaust.

My interest in this matter comes from the research I did on the topic of the Churches during the Holocaust when I was in grad school. By virtue of that research, I'm something of an expert on the topic.

Those of you interested in reading my master's thesis can email me or find it yourself at UT's library or obtain it through interlibrary loan. Here's the pertinent information:

Hatfield, Jeremy Todd, 1969-

An overview of the two faces of the church in German Holocaust literature : passivity and opposition / Jeremy Todd Hatfield.

1995.

vi, 66 leaves : ill. ; 28 cm.

Call number Thesis95.H38

The conclusions that I drew from the Vaticans' dealings during this time are mixed--on the one hand, the Church was very much interested in its own survival, and did factor in the Nazis in consideration of the rise of Communism that was also going on at the time. In this, it limited itself in official, high-profile actions against the Nazis.

On the other hand, there were a handful of notable priests, f. eks. von Galen, Lichtenberg (ditto on his beatification in 1996), and Maximilian Kolbe (canonized in 1982), who did not just stand idly by, but largely acted outside the Church's directives in its dealings with the Nazis.

Despite this, von Galen was beatified in 2005; Lichtenberg in 1996. Kolbe was canonized in 1982. Despite my views on Catholic sainthood, I can stand behind the elections of these individuals to there revered statuses. But Pacelli himself? That's a hard call to make, especially having the luxury of looking back 60 years after the fact.

Anyway, it pushed my history button, and I wound up buying two books on Half.com. One was "Hitler's Pope," and the other a rebutting work called "The Myth of Hitler's Pope." I'll reserve judgement until I have read both of these.

80s Music Quiz

Taken from today's online edition of Aftenposten.

It's in Norwegian, but all the tunes are from the U.S. of A. Simply start the quiz by clicking on the arrow, and you have a few seconds to recognize who wrote the song playing.

I got 96 out of 100. But that's no surprise. I grew up with '80s music.

Chavez Strikes again

And this time, he hopes to undermine America's Capitalist stranglehold on his revolutionary domain...

By attacking McDonald's.
















More to read about it here (in German, from Der Spiegel)

And for those of you who only ready English, here's another news agency's take on it.

Boo-frickin' hoo.

Socialist medicine leaves us with a mess like Canada.
Socialist government leaves us with a wreck like the former East Bloc Countries
Socialist food services will starve the people out.

I don't think Chavez would be able to placate Venezuelans with state-approved Bolivar Burritos.

Whatever Happened to Ex-Post Facto?

h/t Xavier Thoughts

Orange County, PRC, is in the process of revoking some 146 CCW permits it had already issued.

The reason comes in a letter the revokees will receive:

"The Department has determined that your identified risk does not meet the good cause threshold as required under the new CCW policy based upon the information you provided. As a result of this determination, the Department's present intention is to revoke your CCW license."

Now, what caught my attention was "under the new CCW policy."

Fischig. Now, I am not entirely certain what all getting an Orange County CCW permit entails, or if they can be revoked so easily. But my limited legal understanding remembers something called "ex-post facto," which means that if a standard changes, it should not violate another's right, even if it were acquired under an older set of standards.

Take, for instance, speed limits. If Alaska should invoke a strict 55 mph statewide highway speed limit today, it could not revoke my license for having driven 65 mph on its highways for the last few years.

But yet, the new Sherriff of Orange County seems to be doing exactly this sort of thing for legally-acquired CCW permits.

At any rate, I went ahead and read the original article, to see what on earth is going on over there, and found out something that pissed me off even more.

Turns out that Mike Carona, the former Sherriff of Orange County, and who I remember appearing on Full Disclosure about 3 years ago debating L.A. Sherriff Lee Baca over the CCW issue, was indicted on some sort of corruption charge fairly recently. Seems that he showed a little bit of favoritism in handing out permits.

Well, hell. As if an Arschlecker like Lee Baca is any cleaner. He's reknowned for exactly the same sort of behavior, only catering to his county's elite.

But, you see, Baca knows who's in power over in the PRC, and bends over for them like a good...*cough* *cough*. Trying to keep it clean here.

He keeps his position (take that as a double-entendre if you want), while Carona (more favorable to the federal interpretation of 2A--unpopular with the so-called elite) gets canned. Someone else more faithful to the PRC's party line moves in, and the disease keeps spreading.

Thank God I am NOT a subject of the PRC.

Gun Control is People Control

And this bit of history proves further that the ones who benefit are those in power. No surprise there. The examples of Adolf Hitler, Communist Russia, and other autocratic regimes have been used enough to demonstrate that point.

These are probably the more blatant examples of forceful policy used to keep the underlings in line. But on a more subtle level, gun privileges can be dangled out like a carrot on a stick to keep a person or party in power.

This snippet of history comes from 1800s Italy. Sicily, to be precise. I've been reading John Dickie's Cosa Nostra: A History of the Sicilian Mafia when I came across this paragraph, and found it very apropos to how the right to self-defense can be manipulated for purposes of political influence:

"Gun licenses are a good example of the chain of favours linking men like [Don Raffaele] Palizzolo [a prominent man in mid-to-late 1800s Palermo] and the mafia. They could only be obtained with a reference from a leading citizen, such as a politician. This was an obvious opportunity to curry favour. In the run-up to elections the deal became more systematic. On the order of the Minister of the Interior, the prefect could withdraw all gun permits. His declared aim was to prevent the political contest spilling over into violence, but the real aim was to influence the vote. Only sponsoring letters from the central government's favoured electoral candidate would allow the licenses to be returned. The politicians would sell such letters for electoral funds, votes, or favours."

If that isn't an example of what can happen if we allow our 2A rights to be "reinterpreted," then I don't know what is. What was once a right becomes a plaything in the hands of someone wanting to hold onto power.

FactCheck goes down in flames

My Brother and I had been going over Palin vs. Obama a couple of weeks ago.

I am a gun owning, religious minded business owner from Alaska. Guess whose side I take.

He is an actor engaged to a teacher from eastern North Carolina. Guess whose side he takes.

Anyway, he told me about this great "non-partisan" website he found regarding where candidates really stand on the issues--FactCheck.org. Which he had been using to try to debunk some of the attacks against Obama and reinforce those against McCain and Palin.

Well, I'd heard about similar sites, like snopes.com, and many of them take pains to make sure the record is set straight. I figured FC was no different.

Flashback to 1995. I am writing my Master's Thesis, and Professor Höyng makes a remark about a comment I made regarding Friedrich Schiller and his approach to presenting history in drama. He says that basically, there is no difference between Schiller and how others report facts--everyone writes their own perspectives into what they are expressing.

Seems that this was not lost on FC.org. If you follow the link embedded in the title, you'll find some pretty blatant falsehoods regarding Obama's activities regarding 2A. The friendly front-end he puts on for the gun crowd is incompatible with the back-end votes he has cast while in the State and Federal senates.

Seems that FC.org has some left-leaning biases. So much for non-partisanship.

hat tip to Sharp as a Marble.