Careful how you phrase that, Mr. Patriotic 'Murrican.

So in the brouhaha surrounding Scott Olson, former-Marine-turned-hippie-activist and #OCCUPY_THE_NIGHTLY_NEWS almost-a-martyr, I noticed this gem from a righteously indignant right-winger in the comments:

He has the right to free speech but he does NOT have the right to incite violence on our streets..he got what was coming to him..trhe cops said disperse...what didnt he get about that?

Hey, Captain America, are you sure that's what the cops said? "Disperse"? Or did they say something like "Disperse, ye villains! ye rebels, disperse! lay down your arms! why don't you lay down your arms and disperse?"

Jesus wept, can you be that tone deaf? Let me guess: American History was an elective course at your school and you took wood shop instead...

Fall behind!

Tonight's the night where we set our clocks back an hour. (And how come we still call Standard Time "standard" when we're down to using it only about a third of the year?)

This is a splendid time to change the batteries in your smoke detectors and in the red-dot optics on your social guns.

This is also the time when I have to bring the solar-spectrum lamp back down from the attic, because they just don't put enough sunshine coupons in our ration books around here this time of year to keep me happy.

Double standard?

The left side of the blogosphere has been frothing at the mouth over the allegations that Herman Cain engaged in some inappropriate grabassery with underlings at some point in his business career.

This is completely inappropriate! How can the HuffPo set possibly trust a man who allegedly abuses the power imbalance between himself and his female subordinates? We need to get to the bottom of these rumors and find out the truth!

Quick! Somebody call Ken Starr and see if he's got some free time in his schedule!

I don't care who you are, that's funny right there.

Thanks to Troglopundit, I have now seen actual pictures of the Occupy Docking Bay 94 protesters.
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Nothing personal, but...

...if you are a business renting in a Simon property, I won't be spending a red cent with you this holiday season, because your landlords, the Simon Property Group, are a sack of bastards and can go to Hades for all I care.

And they can take their wretched basketball team with them.
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Things I wish I'd done...

So, with Wisconsin now on the side of the angels in the CCW permit wars, I found myself musing with perfect hindsight on something I wish I'd started doing back in '88-'89 when this whole shall-issue campaign started really rolling...

I wish that I had gathered all the newspaper editorials over the years. You know the kind, the ones predicting blood in the streets, mass carnage, shootouts over parking spaces, and generally handwringing over every conceivable Dodge City fantasy the reporter could concoct... And as each new state became embroiled in the shall-issue debate, send the accumulated clippings to the editorial departments of their big newspapers, to reporters and freelance journalists, with an attached note reading simply "To save you work, here are your templates!"

Not that the sight of yellowed, crumbling, decades-old clippings, containing the same shrill predictions that they were about to make, predictions that never came true, would have any influence on their thought processes... But it would have to be just a little embarrassing to know that what you were about to type on your iPad is practically a word-for-word ripoff of hackneyed myths first pecked out on a DOS PC in a smoke-filled newsroom.

Way to make me feel like a killjoy...

It's probably no secret that I think that the commercial pistol version of the KRISS Vector is about as practical, necessary, and useful as a kickstand on a tank, so why would anyone buy one?

"Duh," retorts Caleb, "because they're cool and fun and in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare!"

I tend to forget sometimes that there are reasons to own guns beyond practicality, historical significance, and collectability (read: Blue Book Value...), such as "just for the heck of it." Maybe I'll take my .22 Jet revolver to the range today...

Attempted regime change in the Circle City.

So, America's Mayor, that jackass Bloomberg, is apparently attempting to engage in a little nation-building in the heartland:

Democratic mayoral candidate Melina Kennedy is getting a financial boost from a somewhat unlikely source -- New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg.

The high-profile Independent mayor contributed $25,000 to Kennedy's campaign to oust incumbent Republican Mayor Greg Ballard.

Kennedy said in a statement that she was pleased to receive Bloomberg's support, and said she shares with him a passion to get illegal guns off the streets.

This yayhoo can't keep his own hamlet under control and he has all this time to meddle in the affairs of other polities?

Hey, Mikey! Put some more salt on your fries and tend to your own knittin'. We got things covered just fine out here in flyover country. (Besides, thanks to our shiny new preemption law, the mayor has absolutely nada, zilch, bupkis in the way of control over the whole firearms thing.)

As an aside, why is it that the bigger the city, the slimier the mayor? Look at the big three: Bloomberg, Villaraigosa, and Tiny Dance... er, Rahm Emanuel. Is there one of these people that you'd buy a used car from? That you'd trust to hold your wallet while you jumped in the water to save a drowning kitten*? That strikes you as competent enough to sweep your driveway without you checking up on him every five minutes to make sure he hadn't boosted your broom or subcontracted the job out to your kid?

*As commenter Ancient Woodsman points out, there's not a one of those three that wouldn't chuck a kitten into the water as an excuse to hold your wallet when you jumped in after it...

Who not to vote for.

Here at VFTP, we do not do candidate endorsements, other than "If you feel like voting, vote your conscience and not like it's picking a winning football team."

However, I would like to offer my first official un-endorsement: If you live in Hoosieropolis and intend to participate in this coming Tuesday's quadrennial mayoral log-rolling, payola, and back-scratching festival, please do not vote for Melina Kennedy, who has announced her intention, if elected, to join Bloomberg's "Mayors Above-averagely Indicted Group".

Thank you. *shakes bowcaster*
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Officer Chompy.

Remember me talking about the surreal experience of driving past all those "drug interdiction" cars on I-40 between Detroit-on-the-Mississippi and Nash Vegas?

Well, Cemetery, of Cemetery's Gun Blob, didn't drive past them. Or rather he did, but not very far before the blue lights came on in the rear-view.

Apparently, the cops had brought along that noted Constitutional law expert and Fourth Amendment specialist, Fluffy the Uberhund, to gin up a pretext to shake the car down for dope. (Or, rather, dope money, since he was westbound, although I suppose he could have been running good Kentuckian to points west.)

So, yeah, if your car fits a certain 'profile', you can have it stopped in broad daylight in America by guys in black fatigues and tac-vests with German Shepherd dogs and "Papieren, bitte, y'all."

At least they apparently said "Please" and "Thank You" before and after tearing through his car on the roadside and didn't seem perturbed by all the guns in the vehicle, which is more than you'd get in some states.

Sea level rise...

During the Older Peron Transgression, from about 5,000 to 4,100 BC, the Sahara was going through one of its verdant stages, and the sea levels were three to four meters higher than they've ever been since, outside of the occasional Kevin Costner movie.

It must have been due to all that human industry, lining up rocks in France, digging circular ditches in Germany, and smelting copper in Serbia. (Only Euro imperialists cause pollution. People were being industrious elsewhere in the world at the time, but they were being charmingly ethnic about it, which pleases Gaia like nothing this side of a Shanghai solar panel factory powered by the Three Gorges Dam.)

Overheard in the Hallway:

RX: [from her bedroom] "The hamster's union is threatening to go on strike!"

Me: "They'll bring the nation's exercise wheels to a grinding halt..."

RX: "They'll stop the exercise wheel of the world!"

Pretty cool.

My peeps at Coal Creek Armory will be presenting a custom-built 1911 to a local combat wounded veteran on Veteran's Day.

That's a sharp-looking pistol, and a very worthy cause.

Gunsmith Bob builds a hell of a good 1911. There aren't many 1911s that are match-tight, shoot into an inch or less at 25 yards, and can still be taken right out of the box and run through a 2-day, thousand-round class without cleaning.

It's official...

"Mall Ninja" has jumped the shark, attached by MOLLE fasteners, paracord braid, velcro, fastex buckles, and 100-mph tape to the tactical vest of the zombie.

If "zombie" jumped the shark when Hornady started selling Z-Max anti-zombie ammunition, then "mall ninja" jumped the shark when you could actually pick up the phone and hire you some. (Assuming you can't afford a classy outfit like Dog the Bounty Hunter's.)

Please let it be an elaborate hoax. It hits every trope, from dual-wielding to Hi-Points to fake badges; it has to be a Gecko_45 for a new decade. Right?

Which triggers a sobering thought: Kids that were in first or second grade when the original mall ninja thread happened at GlockTalk are old enough to be in college now. Or Afghanistan. Or hiring themselves out as tactical bodyguard security operator special consultant contractors in Montgomery, AL.

Feelin' ooky....

The actual flu only lasted a few days after my return from Way Out West, but the nasty, persistent, productive cough lingered on. And on. And on...

"When are you going to the doctor with that?" asked Bobbi.

Yesterday morning, a particularly deep cough left me feeling like I'd pulled an oblique muscle in my tummy, so I went to the doc-in-the-box, or rather the nurse-practitioner-in-the-box, to be told what I already knew: I had a cough. No fever, no raging infection, just irritated lungs and a case of acute bronchitis.

I got a bottle of cough syrup and a prescription for one of those inhaler things like the frail kid had in school and went home. And here we are.

Oh, no.

I just heard the news about William the Coroner. :(

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And I am entirely in favor of apple pie! And kittens!

We're nearing the denouement of a pretty nasty little mayoral race here in Hoosieropolis. I'd originally determined to cast my vote for the wookie, Chris Bowen, but the Democrat challenger has almost convinced me to vote (R) purely out of spite.

Her campaign came out of the corner head-butting and eye-gouging and hasn't thrown a punch above the belt since. It didn't help that, being the challenger, her ads started much earlier than his, and she apparently has quite a big war chest. The result is that for several months now the morning TeeWee has been full of commercials accusing the current mayor of actively running businesses out of town and sneaking around at night, setting fires at orphanages.

The few commercials Melina Kennedy has actually run about her own positions all tend to show that she's strongly in favor of improving things over which the mayor has no control. I'm half-expecting her next commercial to either point out that, if elected, she will fight to stop nuclear proliferation, or that Mayor Greg Ballard is still refusing to curtail the menace of Nazis on the moon.

I wish I had a time machine...

...so that I could go back to... say, 1996, and tell people "Seriously, in fifteen years, people are going to get into hair-pulling fights on the internet over whose telephone is better," just to see the look on their faces.

Of course, then I'd have to explain "No, it's like a Newton, except you can actually do stuff with it. Like talk on the phone and surf the 'net."

PDA's were a pretty tough sell back then, kids: All you could really do on 'em was take notes and exchange electronic "business cards". A Palm III was $400 and a Newton was almost twice that; a little notebook, a pencil, and a faux leather business card holder was $1.95 plus tax at Walgreen's. It was a big revolution once you could carry email, games, and full-color porn around in your pocket.

Insomnia Never Sleeps...

Awakened at 0245 by the sound of a cat horking somewhere, I have been a complete failure at getting back to sleep, my mind a whirl of random bits of nonsense...

• In honor of our seven billionth neighbor, I'd like to renew my campaign to convince the Chinese that there's nothing like some ground-up whitetail deer hoof sprinkled on your noodles to put a little lead in your pencil. If we can convince them of that, maybe they'll do to the North American Hoofed Rat what they've already done to the tiger and the rhinoceros.


• If you can't figure out that Catholic University might not be amenable to forming a Muslim prayer club, then how in Vishnu's name did you manage to get any question on the SAT right after "NAME:_________"? It's not like they were trying to sneak their religious affiliation by you there, Achmed. What's next? Suing Bob Jones U. because they won't set up an LGBT Studies Program?


• While he was probably just a garden-variety perv, I prefer to think that somewhere there's a fraternal organization with some really tough initiation rituals: "Okay, Cletus, now you have to put on the pink bikini, climb through the window of the day-care center, and bump & grind for the security camera real sexy-like, 'n' then you're in the club."

Off the shelf...

This may come as a surprise to some folks (I know it did to me) but Noam Chomsky is not just a card-carrying Wobbly and pinko editorialist, but he's also one of the foremost experts on linguistics on the planet. If you want to learn something on the topic, it's hard not to bump up against his studies, and so you just have to filter out the wacky and drive on.

On a similar note, I'm currently enjoying my copy of The Greatest Show on Earth, which is a wonderfully informative and entertaining book and recommend and two thumbs up and so forth, but it would be ever so much more enjoyable if Dawkins would stick to his specialty, which is evolutionary biology, and not make a parenthetical aside once a chapter to blame the Chixculub crater on George W. Bush and Pat Robertson...